Book Image

Delphi High Performance - Second Edition

By : Primož Gabrijelčič
5 (1)
Book Image

Delphi High Performance - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Primož Gabrijelčič

Overview of this book

Performance matters! Users hate to use programs that are not responsive to interactions or run too slow to be useful. While becoming a programmer is simple enough, you require dedication and hard work to achieve an advanced level of programming proficiency where you know how to write fast code. This book begins by helping you explore algorithms and algorithmic complexity and continues by describing tools that can help you find slow parts of your code. Subsequent chapters will provide you with practical ideas about optimizing code by doing less work or doing it in a smarter way. The book also teaches you how to use optimized data structures from the Spring4D library, along with exploring data structures that are not part of the standard Delphi runtime library. The second part of the book talks about parallel programming. You’ll learn about the problems that only occur in multithreaded code and explore various approaches to fixing them effectively. The concluding chapters provide instructions on writing parallel code in different ways – by using basic threading support or focusing on advanced concepts such as tasks and parallel patterns. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned to look at your programs from a totally different perspective and will be equipped to effortlessly make your code faster than it is now.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Join

The Join pattern in OTL serves the same purpose as the PPL version but is implemented in a slightly different manner. The main differences are the way tasks are started and the manner of handling exceptions in background tasks. The OTL version also implements some additional functionality, which I will not explore in this book – namely, setting the number of worker threads and cancellation support.

Let’s start exploring the similarities and differences using a simple example, demonstrated in the ParallelJoin project. The Join 2 tasks button runs the following code that starts two tasks in parallel and waits for them to finish:

procedure TfrmParallelJoin.btnJoin2Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  ListBox1.Items.Add('Starting tasks');
  Parallel.Join(Task1, Task2).Execute;
  QueueLog('Join finished');
end;

Just a reminder that, in PPL, we would achieve the same with the following:

TParallel.Join(Task1, Task2...