I’ve been messing around with code optimization. Like creating a variable to hold an array.length instead of using the array.length in a for/loop.

I’ll post some details later when I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about but essentially I’m iterating through an array with a length of 100,000 - [”0″,”1″, “2″,…”99,999″].

Anyway, I thought I’d try it out when compiled as AS3, just for the sake of comparison. After a few minutes of converting the code - I’m just learning AS3 now - I get it to run without errors. I create a variable to hold the current Date, count through the loop, and then get the Date again and trace the difference between the two dates to the output panel. But my output keeps coming up as zero. I check the code again. Can’t find anything wrong. What the frak?

Then I add another 0 to the count when creating the array so that it contains all the numbers between 0 and 999,999 - that’s a length of one-million. Run the code again and get an output of 16.

So the problem was that counting through an array of just one-hundred-thousand didn’t take a millisecond.

Okay, that was fast.

Just for giggles I ran it up to a length of ten-million. That took 125 milliseconds. I tried the same thing back in AS2 but got the beloved warning that the script is taking too long and would I like to abort. So I dropped it down to a length of one-million and that took 656 milliseconds.

So, in this trivial instance AS3 is running 6,560 times faster than AS2. Nice work guys.

Correction:

The AS3 code is only running 52-times faster than the AS2 code. I forgot to divide by the time it took the AS3 code to run - 125 milliseconds.

Here’s my math in case I’m screwing it up again: it takes the AS2 code 656 milliseconds to run through the loop 1-million times. I get a timeout before it will go up to ten-million so lets just multiply the result of the 1-million loop by 10 and assume that would be how long it would take: 6.56 seconds.

The AS3 code takes 125-milliseconds to run through the 10-million loop. 6560 / 125 = 52.48. So the AS3 code is only running 52.48 times faster.

Sorry about the mistake.

Now I’m somehow disappointed that AS3 is only 50-times faster than AS2. Like that’s a small thing.

You can download the code here. Note: you’ll need the Flash9 Alpha to republish the AS3 code.