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)

Stacks and queues

Spring collections implement three types of collections that are foundational to computer science – a stack (LIFO), a queue (FIFO), and a double-ended queue (deque). Although both queues (and sometimes the stack) are frequently implemented with a linked list, Spring collections implement them with dynamic arrays. This approach is much faster as it doesn’t require frequent allocations of small memory blocks.

Tip

Spring collections include a linked list implementation, ILinkedList<T>, where each node is represented by a TLinkedListNode<T> object, but it is better to ignore it. The implementation in Spring is perfectly fine but this approach – allocating many small blocks of memory – doesn’t work well on modern CPU architectures. Allocated memory is usually not sequential, which leads to poor cache performance when walking over such structures. Use other collections if at all possible.

IStack<T>

A stack...