Tip #8 in my Top 10 Performance Tips For 2012 was to reduce static accesses of variables, functions, etc. in favor of non-static variables and, especially, local variables. I neglected to reference one of my articles and it was pointed out to me that I hadn’t actually written such an article! So today I’ll elaborate on my tip and show why you should prefer non-static and local variables so you can find out just why it deserves its place as a top tip.
Posts Tagged field
One of the very nice features of AS3 (and AS2 and JavaScript for that matter) is that you can dynamically access the fields of any object. This leads to much more dynamic code since you no longer need to know what field to access at compile time. As we’ve often seen with other dynamic features, this can come at a steep cost in terms of performance. Today we’ll see just how slow accessing fields this way is to get a good idea of just how much performance we give up when using this feature.
Quite often I have wanted to iterate over the public fields (and getters) of an arbitrary object. Sometimes this is for debugging purposes so I can print out the state of an object, particularly one that has all public fields like a C/C++ structure. Sadly, this is not possibly (with most objects) using the for-in and for-each loops we’ve come to know and love. So I made a utility function that I’m sharing with you all today. UPDATE: getProperties now supports MovieClip derivatives such as library symbols from an FLA
