Friday 13 January 2012

setter perfomance test, conclusions

So far the accessor tests I've been doing have only been of getters, or more generally of accessor functions for retrieving members from classes. The obvious question is whether setters have the same performance penalty. The answer is yes, they do.

Thursday 12 January 2012

getters and built-in classes

Following on from yesterday's post, an obvious question is whether getters and setters are used for built in classes. The answer is yes, but not for all of them, and it is important to know which.


I won't post code for this, as the code is straightforward but lengthy, and is easily inspected at wonderfl where I've created this program to demonstrate it. It defines two classes, one derived from Vector3D, one derived from Bitmap. The purpose of each is to compare accessing the built-in members of the classes with members added by the derived classes.

Wednesday 11 January 2012

getters and setters are evil

ActionScript has a feature which I have not seen in any other programming language: getters and setters. These are special member functions which when used can be called like direct member access. In some ways this is like operator overloading in C++, except C++ does not allow the '.' operator to be overridden. Having seen how this works in ActionScript it seems like one innovation other languages should not copy.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

Accessors are slow

This is the most important performance optimisation I learned writing ActionScript. It provides a significant performance boost, and in class-based code arises more often than almost all other optimisations. It also flies in the face of what I learned as a C++ programmer.


In C++ accessors are key to good programming practice. Their main use is to hide the implementation from the interface of a class, so the class can be updated without code using it having to be re-written. They make it easy to add code to record accesses for e.g. ref-counting or debugging purposes. Making members private and providing accessors for them documents the code as it indicates which members are safe to access directly which are not because they e.g. have side effects.

Monday 9 January 2012

Variable speed rotation with complex numbers

I wrote only last week that complex numbers are best for mostly fixed or uniform speed rotations. This is true in general, but there are ways to use complex numbers when the speed varies, as long as it varies in a straightforward way. In particular if the speed increases linearly, so with uniform angular acceleration, it can be modelled with complex numbers.