Optimizing method calls

I know you are eagerly waiting to optimize some real code, but please let me stay for a little bit more on the theoretical side of the equation. I spent all that time talking about the behavior of built-in data types but I didn't say anything about how data is passed to methods. This, much shorter and more surprising section (you'll see!) will fix this. As I'll be talking about speeding up method calls, I'll also throw in a short discussion of method inlining, just for a good measure. But first, parameters!

Parameter passing

In essence, Delphi knows two ways of passing parameters to a method (or procedure, or function, or anonymous method, it's all the same). Parameters can...