Delphi compiler settings
First things first—before you start meddling with the code, you should check the Delphi compiler settings for your project. In some situations, they can affect the code speed quite a lot.
To check and possibly change compiler settings, open your project, then select Project | Options from the menu or press Ctrl + Shift + F11. Relevant options can be found in the branch Delphi Compiler | Compiling, as shown in the following screenshot here:
Compiler settings that influence program speed
We will look into the following options:
- Code inlining control
- Optimization
- Record field alignment
- Assertions
- Overflow checking
- Range checking
All of these settings can be enabled/disabled for the complete project and they can also be turned on/off in the code by using compiler directives (comments that start with {$).
Code inlining control
We will look into the concept of code inlining later in this chapter, in the section, Optimizing method calls, so this text will serve just as an introduction...
