David Heffernan

Never mind what the ide says. What does the compiler say?

You should use Integer for loop variables otherwise some day you'll be caught out with an unexpected overflow.

The biggest issue is the use of Smallint

The original question concerned code that called a constructor, then set a bunch of properties. I said, it may be better to pass that information as arguments to the constructor. I'm not proposing overloading anything. I feel that you are using a specific code style from your code base to make a general point that is not valid. I understand why you might have written a bunch of classes to be parameterless and then read state from a DB. But that's really specific to your code base. Why is it bad to pass arguments to constructors? I see absolutely no reason at all to make a blanket recommendation that constructors should not have parameters.

Who said anything about needing multiple overloaded constructors?

Hmm, not quite the same thing

If the information needs to be transmitted, it has to get there somehow.

I don't really understand this. If you need to make multiple instances of the same class that are to be initialised with different values, how are you going to do that? Why does doing that initilisation in a separate stage help?

No, I don't think so.

Seems like dogma to me. Are you really saying that if a method uses more than 5 values of input data then it needs to be passed via properties rather than arguments? Many problems with that. Let's consider just one, thread safety.

Is 32 bit OS still a thing these days? We are about to drop support for it and probably should have done so some time ago.

Very likely this would give a bad UX

That's trivial to deal with these days by putting all dependent DLLs into an assembly that sits alongside your executable.

Just add more arguments. If they need to be provided, then there's no shortcut. You could make the point that when looking at the arguments at the call site you don't see the name of the parameter, but that's something that the tooling should provide you.

There was an issue with some older versions of Delphi where the zlib .obj files supplied by Emba with the RTL were compiled without optimisation and the performance was poor. Can't remember the version, but you'd be able to find the details by searching in Quality Portal to make sure you weren't suffering from that.

Given how poor the Delphi compiler is in terms of performance of generated code, I'd expect this to be slower. Is it?

I'd expect a 64 bit version to be faster.

Your program is 32 or 64 bit? There are fast third party components. You didn't say which ones you were using.

The form isn't destroyed until Self is. But once ShowModal has returned the form can never be seen again. That's a leak.

This leaks the instance

Dalija explained why. So that there's no scope for essential arguments not to be set. To make it clear to the caller what must be provided by them.

Easy to fix and 100% this is what you should do

Why is it confusing?

That sounds more like an argument to the constructor

Do you mean for properties?