Performance Anxiety

The game code was heavy on maths, so I have decided to pinpoint where the difference in performance is coming from. I found an AS3 performance test on AS3 performace test and ported it to hAxe - again, not necessarily perfectly.

You can check out the results here:

• AS3 test
• haXe test

The tests can be seen at http://www.onflex.org/perf/srcview.

As you can see, the haXe code is slower - sometimes a lot slower - than the AS3 code. Of note:

• Test 2 : sort. This is perhaps not surprising because the haXe version is using a custom string compare function, rather than a built-in one.
• Many of the functions are to do with string manipulation. I suspect the probelms here are introduced though the layering of the library via “Std.” and the internal string functions.
• Function 9, the loop code, shows a huge difference. Here I think there must be some loop optimisation that hAxe is missing out on.
• Function 12, a subroutine call, is also very very slow. I think there may be something simple that haXe is not doing.

So there you have it. Loops and function calls - building blocks of most programmes, are very slow.

These differences are way bigger than the file-size differences would suggest, so I think there is still hope that haXe speed can be greatly improved.