Implementing an efficient worker thread pool in Windows can be achieved through the use of IOCP, which is the barbaric acronym for (just as barbaric) Input/Output Completion Port API introduced by Microsoft a while ago.
To make use of IOCP, one has to deal with further barbaric API functions, but the principles are (somewhat) more civilized, and the implementation is quite straightforward.
In this new episode of the TMonitor saga is a comparison of its locking features vs TRTLCriticalSection, aka the OS-supported critical section mechanism. Is it fair? is it fast?
Fairness means that if you have several threads attempting to lock the same resources, they’ll all get a chance and none of them gets the lion’s share. In other words, that there are no race conditions.
Speed is obvious, it’s about the overhead the locking mechanism incurs.
Edit 2013-08-24: looks like the issue discussed here should be resolved in XE5, cf Monitoring the Monitor by Allen Bauer.
In Delphi you can initialize a dynamic array in two ways, either manually or via the Create magic constructor
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DWScript source code recently introduced a newcomer: TRefCountedObject.
This base class takes the place of TObject in dwsUtils, and is now present throughout the DWScript code. What it adds is, well, a manually reference-counted class.
Delphi 2010 added support for the “as” to cast an interface reference to its implementation class.
Here is an alternative that can help both performance and correctness.
If you recognize the title of this article by Robert Lee, then chances are you’ve been around Delphi for a while! 🙂
Alas the optimalcode.com website and Robert Lee disappeared years ago without a trace, but the “Delphi Optimization Guidelines” (dating back from 2002-3003) has been safeguarded and preserved. Recently someone pointed to me that the mirror I had in my Links section had disappeared too…
On this StackOverflow question David Heffernan asked about a hack I’m using in DWScript’s UnifyAssignString.
Committed another round of speedups in the SynEdit SVN, and AFAICT SynEdit is now amongst the fastest text and highlighting editors out there!
To benchmark it yourself, if you don’t have a large text file hanging around, you can make a “meaningful” one easily.
…or when the old/new VCL mule shows it can still kick!
I was asked how hard it would be to do yet-another-Cover Flow-clone with VCL+GLScene, and how that would stand vs using FireMonkey on Windows.