We’ve seen that if-else trees are way faster than Object, Dictionary, and even switch at key-value mapping, but how do they stack up against Array and Vector? Today’s article puts them to the test and uncovers some unexpected results.
Archive for April, 2013
Programming in AS3 invariably involves choosing between various collections: Array, Vector, Dictionary, Object, ByteArray, and so on. What if you need to quickly copy between them? Your choice of collection could result in a 450x slowdown in your app… or a 450x speedup!
Now that AS3 is performing slower than JavaScript in some areas, should we be looking to optimize our AS3 by offloading tasks to JavaScript? That may sound perverse, but the possibility of major speedups is tempting. Today’s article looks for speedups using Flash’s AS3-to-JavaScript bridge: ExternalInterface.
It’s been about a year and a half since my last test of AS3 versus JavaScript and there have been several major releases of both browsers and the Flash Player. Today, we pit every major browser against each other and Flash Player itself to get an updated picture of which provides the fastest scripting environment on the web.
String.charCodeAt is a simple function so you might expect the function call overhead (huge in AS3) to making calling it frequently quite slow. You’d think that there’s no way an charCodeAt-using AS3 function could beat a built-in String function like indexOf. Would you be right? Today’s article examines this special function to see if we might defy conventional wisdom and achieve a performance boost.