[Lazarus] Fastest way to draw

[Brad Campbell]

Mattias Gaertner wrote:
>>
>> There has to be a faster way to get data to the screen in a cross-platform fashion (I'm developing 
>> on Linux but ultimately I'll be compiled for OSX and Win32).
> 
> Paint onto a memory image and then draw that.
> 
> As memory image you can use TBitmap which has comfortable fonts, but
> is not the fastest.
> 

So, taking into account your comment "is not the fastest" I thought I'd give a plain TBitmap a try. 
It's by _far_ the fastest I've tried yet. So fast in fact that I really can't time it using 
Millisecondsbetween(). Amazing.

I have 2 TBitmaps assigned globally. One I pre-prepare with my background (stuff, graticule and 
other lines) every time there is a resize.

In the OnPaint() handler I copy the contents of the background TBitmap to the foreground TBitmap, 
then draw a couple of thousand lines on it before copying it to the canvas of a panel (I'm using a 
TPanel as the display component) using Panel.Canvas.Copy() to copy the canvas from the foreground 
bitmap. I can't believe how fast it is.

Best of all, it requires no new components or packages :)

Regards,
Brad
-- 
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