Today’s article is inspired by Jean-Philippe Auclair’s excellent article on arrays and the comment he recently posted on my article about map performance. In it he discusses how the Array class is implemented using a densely-packed C/C++ array (a contiguous block of memory) and, after the first undefined element, a hash table. This got me thinking of three questions, together the subject of today’s article. First, when an Array‘s densely-packed portion is split using the delete operator, how fast is this? Secondly, can it be re-joined? Third, how fast is rejoining it?
Posts Tagged array
I recently received an e-mail from Dmitry Zhelnin (translation) with a test he did concerning the speed of a couple ways to get a value for a key, which I like to call a map and Wikipedia likes to call an associative array. I’d been meaning to do a similar test for a while now and, guess what, I finally have! UPDATE: fixed miss test for fixed-size Vectors.
AS3 gives you a good number of potential ways you can loop over collections. When Flash Player 10 first came out, I went ahead and tested out the new Vector class in a variety of ways. One of them was to pit it against the collections available in Flash Player 9: Array, Object, Dictionary, ByteArray, and even BitmapData. Below I’ll show you my test and discuss its results.
The Array class has a great function: sortOn(). It does a fast sort based on a property of each element of the array. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent in the Vector class. Below are some attempts to get around that limitation and preserve as much of the speed of sortOn() as possible.
Adding on to existing arrays and vectors is one of those really common tasks that sounds dreary. Everyone knows about push() and unshift() for single elements and concat() for lots of elements. But what if you want to add a lot of elements to an existing array or vector without allocating a new array or vector? I have the solution.
The chief quality of Vectors is that they hold a single type of object. This is why they are sometimes called “typed arrays”. So what would happen if you wanted to convert an array of mixed-type objects into a vector?
Many classes in AS3 are dynamic, meaning that you can add and remove their fields at runtime. This is powerful, but extraordinarily slow. This series will cover some common ways you might be inadvertently using dynamic access or using it too much. This will help you make your code faster. In the first installation of the series, I’m going to talk about the simple act of indexing an array or vector.
The comparison operators (<, <=, ==, >=, >) are clearly core to any programming language. The AS3 docs tell us a little about AS3’s special handling of strings when compared, but there is more to the story.
I often wonder about language features that I know have a lot going on behind the scenes. In AS3, this commonly has me wondering about the for-in and for-each loops, which I use frequently. This article is about what happens to those loops when you change the array you’re iterating over during the iteration.
Vectors– typed arrays in AS3– are much quicker than arrays and therefore very useful. There are many times where you end up with arrays though and need to convert them into vectors for the bulk of your using that data. This article is about that process.