Posts Tagged number

How Big Is That Class?

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When you instantiate one of your classes, how much memory does it use? Today’s article tries out a lot of combinations and counts the bytes used. The conclusion is easy to remember and will give you a solid understanding of how much memory your app is using.

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The Four Vector Classes

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There are four Vector classes in AS3. It seems like there is only one—Vector—and that it supports generics, but that is only an illusion. Today’s article will do some tests to reveal the implications to your app’s correctness and efficiency.

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Converting Numbers to Ints

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This is an extremely common task: converting a Number to an int. There are a lot of ways to do it, but which is fastest in AS3? Today we’ll look at a performance test app that attempts to find the fastest way to accomplish this. The answer just may surprise you!

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Faster Math.abs

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Math.abs is a commonly-used utility function for taking the absolute value of a Number. However, there’s no special-case version for taking the absolute value of an int. Of course Math.abs will work for int values, but we can do it faster. Read on for a couple of ways.

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Vector vs. ByteArray

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Which is the fastest way to store data: Vector or ByteArray? Given that you can upload both types to Stage3D in Flash Player 11, this question has never been more relevant. So which should you use to maximize your app’s speed? Read on for the performance testing.

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What is an int?

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If you’re thinking “I know what an int is”, you need to take this little quiz to find out for sure!

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Explicit Type Conversion

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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.

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Definitive isNaN()

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I wrote an article in November 2009 titled Faster isNaN() and a followup to it titled Even Faster isNaN() and continue to get comments on both, so today I’m doing a followup to bring together both articles and the many comments on them into one definitive article. (UPDATE: added Windows performance results)

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Implicit Type Conversion

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I’ve talked before about explicit type conversion and used the function-call style (Type(obj)) and the as keyword to accomplish the task. Today, I’m going to talk about implicit type conversion and use—as implicit would imply—no operators at all!

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Even Faster isNaN()

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I wrote an article last November showing how to make your isNaN() calls 12x faster. Today, thanks to a tip from the comments on that article, I’ll show you how to make your isNaN() calls even even faster! (UPDATE: see the definitive article on isNaN for much more!)

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