Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
When dynamic strings are used all around, is the use of pointers to
ShortString still recommended? (fmodule contains a lot of them)
Whenever you care about performance, you'll quickly realize that dynamic strings are plain
inappropriate. When it is also known that 255 character limit won't be exceeded, ShortString is
nearly an ideal choice.
In many cases (almost all I found) the strings are duplicated when
assigned, because the given dynamic strings disallow to simply copy the
reference.
IMO P[Short]Strings only were useful when the referenced string shall be
changed later, with that change reflected automatically in all
references. Since this seems not to occur anywhere, I'd suggest to
replace or retype PShortString by [Ansi]String.
They provide fine-grained control over memory allocations, avoiding implicit try..finally blocks and
memory allocations for temps. Copying still occurs, but with the highly optimized Move procedure it
is pretty cheap. So please don't change such things just because something is "used all around".
Regards,
Sergei
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