Don’t Reinvent, Reuse

After dedicating one chapter to a discussion on how to fix an algorithm, it is now time to … do it again! Truth be told, we merely scraped the surface in the previous chapter. You could write an entire book about improving algorithms but I don’t have that much space dedicated to the topic, so you will have to be satisfied with one (more) chapter.

In the previous chapter, we looked at some examples of improving speed by doing less work. This time, we’ll take a different approach and run better, more optimized code. We will, however, not optimize our code – as that is a job for the next chapter – but take the smarter way and use a well-written external library. It will not only be better than our code but will also perform better than Delphi’s Run-Time Library (RTL).

There is, of course, no silver bullet and we cannot expect that one external library will solve all our problems and help us write programs twice...