Book Image

Delphi High Performance

By : Primož Gabrijelčič
Book Image

Delphi High Performance

By: Primož Gabrijelčič

Overview of this book

Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Google Android, iOS, and now Linux with RAD Studio 10.2. This book will be your guide to build efficient high performance applications with Delphi. The book begins by explaining how to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. It will teach you how to improve your algorithms before taking you through parallel programming. You’ll then explore various tools to build highly concurrent applications. After that, you’ll delve into improving the performance of your code and master cross-platform RTL improvements. Finally, we’ll go through memory management with Delphi and you’ll see how to leverage several external libraries to write better performing programs. By the end of the book, you’ll have the knowledge to create high performance applications with Delphi.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The magic of pointers


Our friend, Mr. Smith, has progressed a lot from his first steps in Delphi. Now he is playing with graphics. He wants to build a virtual reality app that would allow you to walk through the Antarctica forests. While he's getting some success, he has problems displaying the correct colors on the screen.

A part of his code is producing textures in Blue-Green-Red (BGR) byte order, while the graphics driver needs them in the more standard Red-Green-Blue (RGB) order. He already wrote some code to fix this problem, but his solution is a bit too slow. He'd like to push a frame or two more from the system and so I promised that I'd help him optimize the converter. I'd be glad to do it, as his problem neatly fits into the story of pointers.

A pointer is a variable that stores an address of some data (other variables, dynamically allocated memory, specific character in the string ...). It is always of the same size, 4 bytes on 32-bit systems and 8 bytes on 64-bit systems—just the...