David Heffernan

Single bytes are aligned, because they can't straddle cache lines. Reads are therefore atomic, because they are aligned. Two byte reads can straddle cache lines and unaligned reads are not atomic.

Actually both of these statements are wrong. Reading unaligned memory is not atomic for reads that straddle cache lines. And unaligned memory access is not slow on modern processors.

The IDE's tools aren't well designed in my view. Don't set the version information that way, instead make it part of your automated build process.

It's not that the override does nothing. There is no override. It makes no sense to me to reintroduce a method of that name.

Why don't you override the method from TObject?