What is it?

TurboSignals is an ActionScript 3 (AS3) library implementing the signals and slots design pattern.

It is used as a fast alternative to AS3’s native EventDispatcher/Event system as well as some third-party libraries such as Robert Penner’s as3signals.

What Features Does It Have?
  • Optimized signal classes for 0-10 parameters as well as var args
  • Slot interfaces for all signals
  • Function slots for all signals so you can use any function as a callback
  • Full unit test suite to ensure correctness using AsUnit
  • Full performance testing suite to measure implementation speed of TurboSignals as well as alternatives (EventDispatcher/Event, as3signals)
  • Open source under the MIT license (see License section below)
Why would I need speed?
  • Hundreds or thousands of game entities (eg. enemies, players) dispatching every frame (eg. position change)
  • Timers dispatching to hundreds or thousands of listeners every frame
  • Tickers telling hundreds or thousands of objects to update every frame
How Do I Build It?

The bin folder should already have TurboSignals.swc in it, but here’s how to
build it yourself:

  • Get the Flex SDK from Adobe
  • Set the FLEX_HOME variable in build.properties to where you installed the Flex SDK
  • Install the Java JDK (development kit) from Sun
  • Install Ant from Apache
How Do I Use It?

Command-line:

  • Specify “-library-path+=/path/to/TurboSignals.swc” in your MXMLC or COMPC builds
What Is Its License?

MIT License so you can use Turbo Signals in any project, open or closed source, including commercial products.

Articles
Version History
  • 1.0.1 – Bug fix where dispatching during a dispatch allowed modification of the first dispatch’s callback sequence
  • 1.0 – First version. Includes library, correctness tests, performance tests, performance tests of alternatives (as3signals, Event/EventDispatcher), ASDoc documentation
Download

Latest version – 1.0.1

GitHub

For more information, see the GitHub project page.

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