Question

I have to pack and unpack a Cardinal into four one-byte fields (in Delphi 2010).

I’m doing this across all the pixels of a large image, so I need it to be fast!

Can anyone show me how to write these two functions? (The const and out keywords are just for clarity. If they interfere with inline assembly, then I can remove them.)

procedure FromCardinalToBytes( const aInput: Cardinal;
                               out   aByte1: Byte;
                               out   aByte2: Byte;
                               out   aByte3: Byte;
                               out   aByte4: Byte); inline;

function FromBytesToCardinal( const aByte1: Byte;
                              const aByte2: Byte;
                              const aByte3: Byte;
                              const aByte4: Byte):Cardinal; inline;

Answer 1

There are many ways. The simplest is

function FromBytesToCardinal(const AByte1, AByte2, AByte3,
  AByte4: byte): cardinal; inline;
begin
  result := AByte1 + (AByte2 shl 8) + (AByte3 shl 16) + (AByte4 shl 24);
end;

procedure FromCardinalToBytes(const AInput: cardinal; out AByte1,
  AByte2, AByte3, AByte4: byte); inline;
begin
  AByte1 := byte(AInput);
  AByte2 := byte(AInput shr 8);
  AByte3 := byte(AInput shr 16);
  AByte4 := byte(AInput shr 24);
end;

Slightly more sophisticated (but not necessarily faster) is

function FromBytesToCardinal2(const AByte1, AByte2, AByte3,
  AByte4: byte): cardinal; inline;
begin
  PByte(@result)^ := AByte1;
  PByte(NativeUInt(@result) + 1)^ := AByte2;
  PByte(NativeUInt(@result) + 2)^ := AByte3;
  PByte(NativeUInt(@result) + 3)^ := AByte4;
end;

procedure FromCardinalToBytes2(const AInput: cardinal; out AByte1,
  AByte2, AByte3, AByte4: byte); inline;
begin
  AByte1 := PByte(@AInput)^;
  AByte2 := PByte(NativeUInt(@AInput) + 1)^;
  AByte3 := PByte(NativeUInt(@AInput) + 2)^;
  AByte4 := PByte(NativeUInt(@AInput) + 3)^;
end;

If you don’t need the bytes to be byte variables, you can do even trickier things, like declaring

type
  PCardinalRec = ^TCardinalRec;
  TCardinalRec = packed record
    Byte1,
    Byte2,
    Byte3,
    Byte4: byte;
  end;

and then just cast:

var
  c: cardinal;
begin
  c := $12345678;
  PCardinalRec(@c)^.Byte3 // get or set byte 3 in c