Starling Forum

1. 

   MacShrike
   

   Expert Bird
   Joined: Apr '12
   Posts: 194

   Ls,

   In my previous flash app try i did everything in two frames with timeline AS.
   Googling somewhat I discovered that the actual VAR keyword usage costs a lot om ms at runtime.
   So they suggest either grouping them or declaring them once as global and reuse.

   Now with my new OOP desires I was wondering wheter the same applies here?
   Is a local VAR declaration still costly?
   And if so would declaring it static solve that?
   Also doing so would seem beneficial garbage collection wise. But i dont know if that is true either.

   Anyone?

   Regards,
   Mac

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   Josh Tynjala
   

   Feathers Guru
   Joined: Feb '12
   Posts: 2,496

   There are many places in Starling where things like Points, Rectangles, and Matrix objects are instantiated as static variables or constants so that they can be shared among all instances of a class (to be used temporarily in functions). It can certainly help avoid costly memory allocation and garbage collection.

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   sHTiF
   

   Moderating Owl
   Joined: Oct '11
   Posts: 828

   Local var declaration isn't costly it doesn't cost ANYTHING. What costs the time is the instantiation/allocation/creation of it not the declaration part.

   This costs nothing:

   var rect:Rectangle;

   this may be costly when called a lot of times:

   var rect:Rectangle = new Rectangle();

   Its completely different thing, and yes if you use "heavy" objects its always better to reuse em, thats what pooling is about as well. AVOID construction/destruction as much as possible.

   Posted 1 year ago #
4. 

   MacShrike
   

   Expert Bird
   Joined: Apr '12
   Posts: 194

   

   Thank you for this insight.

   In my 'defense' I have to say; its a tip i picked up on the web for programming in flash cs5.5
   There's a page with benchmark test tool; here you can see that the actual var keyword does consume a lot of time in flash cs5.5.
   Perhaps i misunderstood it.
   But I, after reading that, moved all my local var declarations outside to the start of the framescript. It got me a decent performance gain.

   Thx

   Posted 1 year ago #
5. 

   sHTiF
   

   Moderating Owl
   Joined: Oct '11
   Posts: 828

   Maybe it has a different effect when used inside framescripts which may be some kind of objects where their local variables are their properties? I am not sure about this as I stay away from frames as much as possible they are evil and a bad design pattern when it comes to programming

   Posted 1 year ago #

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