Was getting panicked about how fast my program was running and started trying to various 'opimizations'. All unnessersary of course, as when I bothered checking it's managing 200 game loops in .9 seconds.

Anyway (now only out of curiousity), a question for gurus, which of these is faster:

x++;
if (x == 4) x = 0;

or:

if (x == 3) x = 0;
else x++;

And why is x--; giving me errors?

Zip

I'm no expert, but I'd guess the second would be faster since it has one fewer increment operation.but is otherwise identical.

x++;
if(x&4) x=0;

yikes! sry man

:: is Bitwise AND really faster than a straight forward equality expresion?

If you were writing C code or something else that would be compiled directly to machine code, yea, the bitwise operation would be much faster than the comparison operation. In the case of a script language, I'm not really sure, though.

I do believe time could be shaved by eliminating the if, if your intention is just to have x count from 0 to 3 repeatedly. Here's how:

x++;
x=x&3; // if x is 4 (100), it will become 0

or, i wonder if this is faster?
x=(x+1)&3;

When comparing verge speed operations, just do

Autoexec() {





   //the operation here





   exit( str(systemtime) );


}

For each operation and then compare the values.

If the operation in question is less than a ms, slap each in a for-loop containing only that operation and loop it a few thousand times, then compare. The overhead for each should be the same, and therefore cancel out, and the difference should prove to be true (ie, although you won't know the absolute time of the operations, you will know the difference in speed between the slower one and the faster one.)

Although general programming assumptions like Big O and the such should prove true in vc, I'm not sure if the c assumptions hold up in vc. Test it and find out!