> No, don't know Delphi-Talk > Yes, I am worried about the memory allocation stuff > Yes, and fragmentation and > Yes, I use a lot of string stuff > So how can I deal efficiently with strings?
It isn't really any issue solely of strings per se. It's more about understanding what is happening behind the scenes and when and how the things you do in the language result in memory allocations and deallocations and then determining if the task at hand is large or significant enough to warrant a better approach. If you use ansistrings, normally the default Delphi string, then they're dynamic. What does this mean? You must understand this. Thus, unless you take steps to the contrary, everytime you simply assign new values to such a string, allocations and deallocations take place. Straight-forward. The only alternative to this is to do things the way we used to, handle the allocation yourself. Ex. Null-terminated strings, or more precisely, arrays of chars, were important immediately because one could allocate once, a large but reasonable array, write new data to the array of chars at any time, stop by adding an ending null and never worry about junk data, never worry about zeroing first, or clearing old data. As long as what you needed fit inside your initial allocation, you used that array over and over without worry. Oh you might have to write character by character, so macros developed, null-terminated handlers, etc. But you could minimize allocations. Of course, there are reasons to prefer dynamic arrays as well. But certainly not when one knows ahead of time that might involved a zillion repetitive alloc/dealloc procedures. Strings or arrays of whatever, lists of records or other binary data, it makes no difference. It's simply a matter of understanding how to use, request and release memory efficiently for what you're wanting to do. With more efficient handling comes more work. You have to decide the trade-offs. As the example that lead to this discussion demonstrated, the down-side can be as bad as being literally dysfunctional; the upside can be a performance boost beyond expectations. Regards, ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jim Burns, <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Technology Dynamics Pearland, Texas USA 281 485-0410 / 281 813-6939 _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> [email protected] http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi
