Delphi Programming Tips & Tricks

First, forgive me if some of my thoughts seem a bit contradictory or confusing. My brain is still steaming... and I am not sure what to think... Please, no... What took you so long... Nooooo.... But before, I start rationalizing... ARC IS NOT BROKEN, IT JUST NEEDS SOME POLISHING... I have been saying for a long time that the dual memory management model is not good in the long term and there should be only one memory management system, but by removing ARC in Linux compiler (10.3) and future plans to remove it from mobile compilers, I am afraid that Embarcadero have opted for the wrong one. Yes, ARC in Delphi has some issues, but those issues are fixable. Manual memory management is an obsolete technology. It has some niche use cases, but for general-purpose programming, you don't want to waste time on memory management. You want to focus on the real functionality of your code. To be fair, every memory management model has its strong and weak sides. Every one is more ...

It is common knowledge that exceptions raised in some piece of Delphi code can be caught and handled with try...except blocks. No matter what. try // here goes some horrible or not so horrible code // that can raise the most horrible exceptions except // no matter how horrible exceptions are // you will always land here where you can handle them, // eat them up and pretend they never happened, // or do something and re-raise them // YOU ARE IN CONTROL end; For example: type TFoo = class(TObject) public procedure Foo; virtual; end; procedure TFoo.Foo; begin end; var Foo: TFoo; begin Foo := nil; try // calling a virtual method on nil reference raises an Access Violation exception Foo.Foo; except Log.d('CAUGHT'); end; end; Capturing and handling exceptions within try...except blocks is one of the cornerstones of Delphi coding practices. Millions of lines of code depend on that exception trap, from w...