Delphi High Performance - Second Edition

Preface

Performance matters!

I started programming on 8-bit micros, and boy, was that an interesting time! Memory was typically not a problem, as we didn’t write big programs, but they certainly weren’t running fast, especially if you run them with a built-in BASIC interpreter. It is not surprising that I quickly learned assembler and spent lots of early years shifting bits and registers around. So did almost everybody else who wanted to release a commercial application written for one of those computers. There were, more or less, no games and applications written in BASIC simply because they would run too slowly and nobody would use them.

Times have changed; computers are now fast — incredibly fast! If you don’t believe me, check the code examples ...