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)

Map

Let us move from a very complicated pattern to something really simple. The Map pattern was designed for one simple task. It takes an array, runs a mapping function on all of its elements in parallel, and returns a new array containing modified data. It implements the same functionality as Spring’s TEnumerable.Select, except that it uses multiple worker threads. Besides mapping, it also supports data filtering, so we can also use it as a fast filter or a combined mapper/filter.

The ParallelMap demo implements two approaches to solve the same problem. They both create an array of 1,000,000 large-ish integer numbers (from 1,000,000 up), check each element in that array for primality, and generate a new array containing only prime numbers. They both measure the time used to check primality and generate the new array but ignore the time needed to prepare the input data.

The Serial button triggers an event handler, shown next, which does this in an idiomatic Delphi way...