a point in haxe: inline ftw!

A while back, I talked about how delineating between structures and objects could have some performance implications.

Since then I have periodically doubted the conclusions I drew from my observations. My results still indicate that for Java with the JVM I used, structuring the code into a point structure and implementing the operations as a collection of static operators does make for a significant performance increase.

What I came to doubt was the universality of this observation.

Specifically, I wanted to see if this design methodology also payed off with haxe or if it was more of a JVM implementation artifact.

To test it, I wrote 3 different implementation of a "point" class:

typedef TypedPoint = {
    public var x : Float;
    public var y : Float;
    public var z : Float;
}
class TypedPointOps {
    public inline static function add( dest:TypedPoint, a:TypedPoint, b:TypedPoint ) : TypedPoint {
        dest.x = a.x + b.x;
        dest.y = a.y + b.y;
        dest.z = a.z + b.z;
        return dest;
    }
}

class Point {
    public var x : Float;
    public var y : Float;
    public var z : Float;

    public function new( ?x:Float, ?y:Float, ?z:Float ) {
        this.assign( x, y, z );
    }

    public function assign( ?x:Float, ?y:Float, ?z:Float ) : Point {
        this.x = x;
        this.y = y;
        this.z = z;
        return this;
    }

    public function add( a:Point, b:Point ) : Point {
        this.x = a.x + b.x;
        this.y = a.y + b.y;
        this.z = a.z + b.z;
        return this;
    }
}

I wrote another version called "InlinePoint" which is just like "Point", but used the "inline" keyword.

Here is the result:




It basicly "adds" two points together 1 million times.

Here is the breakdown:

point  : 0.019s
inline : 0.010s
typed  : 1.355s

As you can see, the object version using the "inline" keyword is extremely fast compared to the alternatives.

In testing, I used the neato flashplayer command line tool that came as part of the Adobe Flex Builder Linux Public Alpha

% flashplayer pointsDemo.swf

For some reason it shows the "point" time as "0.149s"... weird... The "typed" time was also pretty different... eh...

So... why did I bother? Now I know I can port my JS 3D library straight to haxe without any major refactoring! :-D