Multi-threaded access of components in Delphi

Question

Can you suggest an approach when design-time components can be accessed both from general code (VCL or other) and from my own threads? The problem is that when I have full control over my own threads I know exactly when I should access mutexes. In case of design-time elements I have no control at least of the code related to VCL. One of the variants would be to wrap HandleMessage in a mutex access code. The idea behind this is that almost everything related to VCL comes from message processing code (the exception is direct SendMessage handling). But looking at the sources I see no "official" way to wrap message handling in any code fragment.

Answer 1

Don't even try to go there. Google for "global interpreter lock" (Python specific) to see what a bad idea such a bottleneck is.

If you need synchronized access to data, try to make the locked access as short as possible, and lock not any higher in the call chain than you absolutely must. If you have objects that are to be accessed from multiple threads, then synchronize inside their methods.