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)

The magic of pointers

Our friend, Mr. Smith, has progressed a lot from his first steps in Delphi. Now he is playing with graphics. He wants to build a virtual reality app that would allow you to walk through the Antarctica forests. While he's getting some success, he has problems displaying the correct colors on the screen.

A part of his code is producing textures in Blue-Green-Red (BGR) byte order, while the graphics driver needs them in the more standard Red-Green-Blue (RGB) order. He already wrote some code to fix this problem, but his solution is a bit too slow. He'd like to push a frame or two more from the system and so I promised that I'd help him optimize the converter. I'd be glad to do it, as his problem neatly fits into the story of pointers.

A pointer is a variable that stores an address of some data (other variables, dynamically allocated...