RE: Lazarus Pascal - How to make a Delay/Sleep without locking up your application

Hans — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 09:21:53 +0000

Since the previous functions uses GetTickCount, which has its issues and GetTickCount64 appears a better choice, you may also want to consider the alternative below, which uses TDateTime instead, where we can set our delay in milliseconds (1000=1sec).

Note: uses the dateutils unit.

procedure MyDelay(milliSecondsDelay: int64);
var
  stopTime : TDateTime;
begin
  stopTime := IncMilliSecond(Now,milliSecondsDelay);
  while (Now < stopTime) and (not Application.Terminated) do
    Application.ProcessMessages;
end;

Lazarus Pascal - How to make a Delay/Sleep without locking up your application

Hans — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 09:52:27 +0000

So I had to add a delay (better said: sleep) in my code, so that after displaying a temporary status message, would revert back to it's previous message. Kind-a like a brief bleep showing a notification and then going back to where we left off.

Now the sleep() function has a little problem ... it's totally locks your application (Zzz mouse, or spinning ball) and the user can't really do anything.

With a neat little trick you can do this better;

procedure MyDelay(DelayTickCount: DWORD);
  var
    StartTickCount : DWORD;
  begin
    StartTickCount := GetTickCount;
    while (GetTickCount < StartTickCount + DelayTickCount) and (not Application.Terminated) do
      Application.ProcessMessages;
  end;

So this function does NOT lock you user interface, but does wait with the next steps for "DelayTickCount" milliseconds.

Lazarus Pascal - How to make a Delay/Sleep without locking up your application - Delphi, Lazarus, Free Pascal

RE: Lazarus Pascal - How to make a Delay/Sleep without locking up your application

Lazarus Pascal - How to make a Delay/Sleep without locking up your application