Summary

I would be the first to admit that this chapter presents only sketches of ideas rather than fully reusable solutions. That is a direct consequence of the topic, which is too broad to give definite answers. Rather than that, I have tried to give you enough information to do your own research on the topic.

The chapter started with a discussion of the possible reasons for including external libraries in your application. They may cover a topic you are unfamiliar with, or they may implement some specific algorithm faster than you are able to—or faster than the Delphi compiler can do it.

That brought us to the FastMath Delphi library, which implements fast functions for working with vectors (series of numbers) and matrices (two-dimensional arrays of numbers). This library uses assembler intermixed with Pascal to give you the best performance in each case. We saw how assembler code is sometimes included internally and sometimes as an external file, and we can write a...