During some recent memory profiling I was reacquainted with just how many ways there are to unknowingly allocate an object in AS3. The problem is seldom the allocation itself, but rather the later garbage collection (GC) to delete those objects. Ever used a Flash profiler only to see a huge chunk of your CPU time going to [reap], [mark], or [sweep]? Yeah, that’s the GC at work. Today’s article talks about some of the ways you end up allocating objects in AS3 without using the new keyword. These subtle errors can end up costing you!
Posts Tagged string
Explicit Type Conversion
Apr 25
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.
String Conversion
Apr 30
It struck me recently that there are a lot of ways to convert variables of many types to a the String type. The ease of doing this is one of AS3′s strengths over languages where it’s error-prone, possibly insecure, and just plain difficult. The C language is the most obvious example of this and, since then, seemingly every language has enshrined string conversion in ways ranging from global String() functions (AS3) that take any variable to adding toString() to the base Object type (Java, AS3, others). AS3 seems to have chosen “all of the above” and there are now many ways to convert to a string. Below I’ll look at them from a performance standpoint and see if the everyday, run-of-the-mill boring string conversion can be improved by choosing one option over another.
The Size of Empty
Apr 20
I was reminded about the flash.sampler API by Grant Skinner’s recent post about it. While only available in the debug player, it can still tell us some valuable information about what goes on in the release player. Today I’m using the getSize function to find out how much memory overhead various classes impose, even when they are empty.
