Magic behind FreeAndNil
Delphi 10.4 Sydney brings one small but rather significant change. A change in the signature of the FreeAndNil procedure from procedure FreeAndNil(var Obj); inline; to procedure FreeAndNil(const [ref] Obj: TObject); inline; Wait, const means the variable is passed as a constant and cannot be changed from within the procedure. But the whole point of FreeAndNil is to change the passed object variable to nil. What kind of sorcery is this? Let's start from the beginning and the old FreeAndNil procedure, its purpose and implementation. The purpose of FreeAndNil is to simplify the following code sequence: Foo.Free; Foo := nil; While the actual implementation of FreeAndNil is slightly different, and it will first nil the reference and then Free the object instance (temporarily preserved in a local variable), that slight difference is not relevant for discussing the signature of FreeAndNil . procedure FreeAndNil(var Obj); var Temp: TObject; begin Temp := TOb