Five months ago I said I’d talked about explicit type conversion. I hadn’t, really. What I talked about before was type casts. A cast changes the type, not the data. Today, I’m actually going to talk about type conversion and show you the costs of converting between all of your favorite types: int, uint, Number, Boolean, String, and even XML.
Archive for April, 2011
Explicit Type Conversion
Apr 25
When you construct an Array or a Vector, you can specify an initial size. Why would you do this?There are various reasons you may want to reserve initially-unused slots for logic reasons, but are there any performance gains to be had by pre-allocating this space for an Array or Vector you intend to completely fill right away? Today I’ll take a look to see just how much performance can be gained by pre-allocating Arrays and Vectors.
Fake Functions
Apr 11
Today’s article is about a hack. It’s a hack dedicated to improving the performance of helper functions, nested or not. you may not like the way the code looks, but you’ll love the speed!
Constructing Arrays
Apr 4
In AS3, you can create an Array can be created with special syntax: myArray = []. You can even fill the Array with values all in one go: myArray = [1,2,3,4,5]. This is a nice shorthand that saves some typing compared to using the constructor: myArray = new Array(1,2,3,4,5). But, which way is faster? Today we find out! UPDATE: added a third way of creating arrays
