I’ve previously covered ways of implementing in my article on Runnables (aka observers) which showed how to call back about 15 times faster than just using a Function object. There are still more ways to call back though and I didn’t cover them at the time. Today I’ll be adding to Function and Runnables by testing Event and the as3signals library by Robert Penner.
Posts Tagged functions
The last three articles have been about utility functions for objects, classes, and display objects. This is the finale in the series and contains some leftover utility functions.
On the heels of last Friday’s article on Utility Functions For Objects, today’s article will show a few utility functions for the Class class. In case you’re not familiar with it, Class represents a class like you would write and is useful main for more dynamic programming where you want to instantiate a class based on a variable (eg. var c:Class) rather than a constant (eg. BitmapData). So how do you get a Class variable? The Flash API provides some ways to go about it and I’ll provide some ways to make that more convenient.
Like most programmers writing non-trivial applications, I’ve piled up a lot of utility functions over the years. Most of them are simple and effective. They are short and get their job done. You or someone you know has probably written these functions, but maybe not in AS3. So today I’m going to share a few utility functions for Objects in AS3.
Inlining Math Functions
Nov 13
As a followup to my article on Inlining Math.ceil(), I decided to inline some more functions in the Math class. Read on for the code as well as tests proving correctness and speed.
Getters and setters are indeed a very nice feature of AS3. They eliminate a lot of typing (.x versus .getX()) shaves off five characters and removes the need to hit the shift key for X) and make getting and setting values much more natural by disguising the fact that you’re actually calling a function. The downsides include the difficulty (impossibility?) of getting a Function variable for them and lower performance. This article is about that performance hit. EDIT: added a plain getter test)
Function Performance
Oct 30
With access specifiers, statics, plain functions, and overriding, there are a lot of ways you can dress up a function in AS3. But how many programmers really know the performance implications of these options? Read on to find a straightforward test showing just that. EDIT: added functions defined in interfaces, getters, setters, and final functions.
Regular expressions are downright handy for a variety of string processing tasks. They are so handy that they are built straight in to the language in the form of the /regexpgoeshere/ syntax. Well, usually…