Recently, I’ve seen a lot of performance-critical code that has made heavy use of field variables. For example, an expensive loop might look like this: for (var i:int = 0; i < this.numObjects; ++i). I've recommended to some of the programmers writing such code that they modify it to cache the field variable as a local variable to improve performance. Was I right to recommend this? In today's article I'll examine the read and write times to see if caching field variables locally really improves performance.
Posts Tagged variables
Local Variable Caching
Mar 14
Argument Clash
May 24
I am often burned by MXMLC: the AS3 compiler. When I am, I find this infuriating and look for the reason why this happened. Today I’ll tip you off about this problem and delve into what it means if you happen to trigger it.
With Blocks Part II
May 17
I wrote an article last summer about with blocks, but really only touched on basic usage. Today I’ll delve into their internals a bit and discover some surprising aspects.
With Blocks
Aug 28
While plainly documented by Adobe in the Flash 10 AS3 Docs, it seems as though few programmers know about the with statement. I don’t use them much personally, but when a coworker came across one in my code recently and was puzzled, I figured I would write a quick article to cover their usage.
Class Bootup
Aug 21
Being allowed to declare and define member variables all at once introduces a question: in which order does the class boot up? Further, if the class has parent classes, how does this change things? Read on for the simple results.
Function Variables
Aug 19
AS3, AS2, and JavaScript have some strange rules regarding the initialization of variables. These are shocking and perhaps ridiculous to users of C and Java. This article covers one particularly insane quirk.
Overriding Variables
Aug 17
AS3 makes some strange things possible. Even stranger, it seems to do this without any warning by its compiler: MXMLC. It seems as though one of these strange things is the ability to override the variables of your parent classes.
Initializing Constants
Aug 7
Today I bring to you… another silly compiler quirk! Read on for the silliness.
Pointless Code
Jul 31
We’ve all seen it, perhaps even in our own code. It’s something I think we do because we’re not really sure what would happen if we didn’t do it. Here are some little tidbits of pointless code I’ve been seeing recently:
