Version 5.0 of Safari was released on just a couple weeks ago on June 8 and Google Chrome was updated just a week before that. More importantly, to this site anyways, is the release of Flash Player 10.1 on June 10. Today’s article shows an updated performance comparison to check up on the progress being made in both JavaScript (Safari, Chrome) and AS3 (Flash Player).
Archive for category JavaScript
Argument Clash
May 24
I am often burned by MXMLC: the AS3 compiler. When I am, I find this infuriating and look for the reason why this happened. Today I’ll tip you off about this problem and delve into what it means if you happen to trigger it.
Cancelable Function
May 10
I recently had the need to cancel a callback function that I had passed to an API. The API had taken my callback function directly, so there was no way to remove the event listener. So I thought back to an old article I wrote and came up with a solution. Read on for a utility function that will allow you to cancel function callback in AS3 as well as JavaScript and AS2.
Version 10.5 of Opera was released today. Opera 10.0 last performance test made some small strides over 9.64, but it was still the slowest current version of the browser out of the whole test. Also, Google Chrome was updated on January 25th and Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 on January 21st. Today’s article shows an updated performance comparison to check up on the progress being made by Opera, Google, and Mozilla.
Another Gotcha
Jan 26
I’m back from a month off for winter break! Today I’ll start off with a very short article to ease back into things. Today I’ll cover a “gotcha” that got me recently and resulted in a bug report that was pretty tough to solve. Read on to see what it was.
Today’s article is a followup to an article I wrote in August comparing the performance of AS3 (Flash Player) and JavaScript (various browsers). Since then, two browsers have been updated to new versions and both have claimed speedups in their JavaScript implementations. Today’s article tests those new browser versions to see their speedups in the context of our benchmark: AS3.
For Vs. While
Nov 27
I’ve recently been seeing more and more usage of while loops by those who I presume are interested in performance. I’ve always assumed that these was not faster than for loops, but today I am finding out.
Faster isNaN()
Nov 11
You cannot directly check if a value is NaN by comparing with it. AS3, AS2, and JavaScript therefore provide a useful isNaN() function to do this very check. However, it is very slow. Today I’ll show you a workaround that results in a faster isNaN():
Flexible If Syntax
Nov 2
This article is sort of a follow-up to my article on Flexible Loop Syntax. This was reported to my by a coworker who spotted the anomaly. I guess he had done with if the same sort of thing that I had done with for. Read on for a little insight into how the comma operator interacts with the if statement.
Repeatable Random
Oct 21
Everybody knows about Math.random(), and for good reason. It’s pretty much the way to get random numbers in AS3, AS2, and JavaScript other than bizarre alternatives like AS3’s BitmapData.noise(). However, it has one critical problem that arises when you want to repeat a certain test or prevent game cheaters from exploiting the randomizer until they get an “easy” setup or desirable outcome. This problem is the lack of repeatability.
