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 (11 chapters)

Memory management functions


Besides the various internal functions that the Delphi runtime library (RTL) uses to manage strings, arrays and other built-in data types, RTL also implements various functions that you can use in your program to allocate and release memory blocks. In the next few paragraphs, I'll tell you a little bit about them.

Memory management functions can be best described if we split them into a few groups, each including functions that were designed to work together.

The first group includes GetMem, AllocMem, ReallocMem, and FreeMem.

The procedure GetMem(var P: Pointer; Size: Integer) allocates a memory block of size Size and stores an address of this block in a pointer variable P. This pointer variable is not limited to pointer type, but can be of any pointer type (for example PByte).

The new memory block is not initialized and will contain whatever is stored in the memory at that time. Alternatively, you can allocate a memory block with a call to the function AllocMem(Size...