Book Image

Mastering Delphi Programming: A Complete Reference Guide

By : Primož Gabrijelčič
Book Image

Mastering Delphi Programming: A Complete Reference Guide

By: Primož Gabrijelčič

Overview of this book

Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for most operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, iOS, and now Linux with RAD Studio 10.2. If you know how to use the features of Delphi, you can easily create scalable applications in no time. This Learning Path begins by explaining how to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. You'll brush up on tricks, techniques, and best practices to solve common design and architectural challenges. Then, you'll see how to leverage external libraries to write better-performing programs. You'll also learn about the eight most important patterns that'll enable you to develop and improve the interface between items and harmonize shared memories within threads. As you progress, you'll also delve into improving the performance of your code and mastering cross-platform RTL improvements. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be able to address common design problems and feel confident while building scalable projects. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: Delphi High Performance by Primož Gabrijel?i? Hands-On Design Patterns with Delphi by Primož Gabrijel?i?
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Lock

The big power of multithreaded programming lies in the fact that all threads can access all the memory in the program. When we create a new thread that will process some program data, we don't need any special preparations. We just create the thread and that data will be available to it.

This, however, is also the biggest weakness of multithreaded programming. If multiple threads are accessing the same data, they can easily interfere with each other. One thread can overwrite the data of another thread or it can modify the structure that another thread is using. This results in all kinds of problems, including random crashes at unexpected locations.

As an example, imagine this situation. A first thread is walking some list and processing elements with the following code:

for i := 0 to FList.Count - 1 do
DoSomethingWith(FList[i]);

FList is a global object and...