David Heffernan

What's the point? You've already reached a false conclusion based on a flawed investigation. If we try to point this out you tell us that you aren't interested in learning the truth.

Why aren't you curious to learn about how virtual memory works? Why aren't you curious to learn how sub-allocating memory managers work? Why aren't you curious to learn what address space fragmentation is?

I understand that you'd like that conclusion. It would be nice if it were true though. It isn't.

If you don't know about address space fragmentation, don't you wonder whether or not it is relevant?

Are you measuring address space fragmentation?

It's just calling methods and accessing attributes. No different for pandas than for any other library.

Delphi's memory manager is fastmm. Also, your tool to measure the effect of the program isn't really telling you anything. It says nothing about fragmentation of address space. Virtual memory is a very complex subject. I suspect you need to learn more of the details before you can reason about your program.

Seems a bit needy

Agreed. Why would the main form destroy itself before the code in the dpr completes?

There are lots of posts on this topic on the madExcept forum. Websearch with the obvious search terms will find them.

You seem to be wanting to change your program, but now you tell us that you can't change it. Seems like a waste of time.

If you can't change anything, I wonder what this topic is about. Is it a thought experiment?

You don't need to change them. You just need new versions of your existing glyphs.. You'll need to hire a graphic designer.

You need to spend some time and establish some basic facts. We can't give you meaningful help on this basis.

Clearly you have got some code. The code is what you are trying to compile. The error message tells you what line of code causes the error. If it used to compile, something changed. What?

Do you have any code?

It's kinda lame that they still haven't addressed this. It's been an issue since Delphi 1. The tech exists. They can already dynamically load and unload packages.

This seems like a much better approach to me. And as soon as you have to deal with different versions of a library, then aren't you forced this route?

You have different SVG files for different icon sizes in some cases?

But scalable doesn't tend to be right for icons because you often want to tailor the icon to the size. So a small version of the icon might have quote different content from a large version.

I don't think SVG is the right way to handle scaling of icons. Why do you think that?

I don't. I skip that step where you reinstall Windows!

Well, yes. That's part of the contract. SetLength is contracted to return a unique object, that is with ref count 1. It's even documented! http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.SetLength "Following a call to SetLength, S is guaranteed to reference a unique string or array -- that is, a string or array with a reference count of one.“ The only scenario you've raised that I could see being troublesome is a copy for weak refs. Everything else isn't going to have discernible real world impact.

I'm just saying that it's very unlikely that there will be real world code that suffers. That said, I don't know about weak refs so that could be significant.

OK, so no copy, and not much else, unless it's a jagged array or has weak refs.