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)

Memory management functions

Besides the various internal functions that the Delphi runtime library (RTL) uses to manage strings, arrays and other built-in data types, RTL also implements various functions that you can use in your program to allocate and release memory blocks. In the next few paragraphs, I'll tell you a little bit about them.

Memory management functions can be best described if we split them into a few groups, each including functions that were designed to work together.

The first group includes GetMem, AllocMem, ReallocMem, and FreeMem.

The procedure GetMem(var P: Pointer; Size: Integer) allocates a memory block of size Size and stores an address of this block in a pointer variable P. This pointer variable is not limited to pointer type, but can be of any pointer type (for example PByte).

The new memory block is not initialized and will contain whatever...