Delphi Programming Tips & Tricks

As soon as you step into writing multithreaded code, you will need to work with collections in a thread-safe manner. While Delphi provides some basic thread-safe collections for its own use in the RTL and visual frameworks, those are usually not enough. So you will either end up using some third-party thread-safe collection library, or you will be insipired to roll out your own. Making thread-safe collections is not a very complicated task, but if you are not careful, you can easily end up using locking patterns which will look fine at first glance, but can cause excessive locking when used. You will get thread safety, but running at a snail's pace. Considering that modern computers are powerful enough, such code can still run at an acceptable speed, and you might not even notice that you are burning CPU cycles in vain. Thread-safe Collection To implement any thread-safe collection, you will need a lock. While there are many different lock types we can use based on particular n...

Delphi 12 is in the works. One of its small features that will have a huge impact is a change in the default handling of floating-point exceptions, which will now be masked on all platforms. Previously, floating-point exception handling was different across platforms, and most notably on the Windows platform: In VCL and console applications, floating-point exceptions were not masked and would raise an exception. On the other hand, FireMonkey applications had all floating-exceptions masked by default, regardless of which platform they were running on. Basically if you haven't explicitly changed the exception mask in your code to some value other than the default, and you had code that attempted to divide some number with zero, you would get an EZeroDivide exception in previous Delphi versions on the Windows VCL application. In Delphi 12, there is no exception, and the result of such a division will be +INF . So the following code will no longer raise an exception. If you were r...