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)

Optimizing strings and array allocations

When you create a string, the code allocates memory for its content, copies the content into that memory, and stores the address of this memory in the string variable. Of course, you all know that by now as this was the topic of the previous chapter.

If you append a character to this string, it must be stored somewhere in that memory. However, there is no place to store the string. The original memory block was just big enough to store the original content. The code must therefore enlarge that memory block, and only then can the appended character be stored in the newly acquired space.

As we'll see further on in the chapter, FastMM tries to make sure that the memory can be expanded in place, that is, without copying the original data into a new, larger block of memory. Still, this is not always possible and sometimes data must be copied...