XML is widely used in AS3 applications for everything from simple configuration files to complex networking protocols. AS3 even includes 10 operators in its syntax specifically to make XML easier to work with. This often leads to AS3 developers loading XML documents and then just leaving them as an XML objects. XML’s performance begins to seep into the rest of the AS3 application. Today we look at just how much this can slow down our apps.
Posts Tagged access
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.
AS3 has an interesting feature that is sometimes used to great effect: dynamic classes. These classes can have fields added and removed to them and used like any other field. You can even make your own dynamic classes with the dynamic keyword. However, all of this fancy functionality comes at a steep performance cost. How steep? Read on to see just how steep.