* flash player 10’s vectors (only indexing for now)

* instantiation of Array, Object, Vector and (very expensive) ArrayCollection

* different type of loop

and more!

It’s important to remember to always take this benchmark with a grain of salt. That said, if you feel the benchmarks being tested are lame, feel free to contribute to code on github. Also, I used a lot of blog posts written by others to do this. Even if there are some comments in the source code, it lacks some proper credits. Sorry about that guys but justice will be done in the next update.

the application

the source

the lighthouse project

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To help us, we build an application, open source (MIT), the “AS3 performance tester”, that takes some operations (such as incrementing a variable) and measure the time consumed by the different options you can use to achieve the operation.

There are a lot of resources on the web about AS3 performance but none seem to embrace the whole problem. Enter the AS3 performance tester. With it, we are trying to build a comprehensive tool that demonstrates (with tests) which syntax for a particular task is the most performant in AS3.

But first things first with the usuals:

More Computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency than any other reason including blind stupidity”–W.A. Wulf

“Premature Optimization is the root of all evil.”-Hoare and Knuth

“Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and
put in a speed hack until you have proven that’s where the bottleneck is.”-
Rob Pike

Nevertheless, here we talk of the basic of the AS3 language. Things you do in your everyday programming. Do you know the faster way to loop over an array ? Do you know that division is slower than multiplication and slower than bitwise operations ?

Most of the time, to provide accurate metrics, we loop on the operation a number of times and we calculate the mean. This application will evolve to include more robust tests.

We also used the D.eval library to allow the user to enter 2 scripts and compare performance on the fly. It uses a kind of eval() function so the code is much slower than actual compiled code. Nevertheless, our tests, so far, show that the proportions are right: a script slower with the eval() will be slower when compiled. Nevertheless, we mark this feature as highly experimental as my understanding of what the D.eval do can give improper results.

the application

the source

the lighthouse project

Ready to try Bime? Take the free trial