November 2007 – HughSando.com

I see that APE [http://www.cove.org/ape](http://www.cove.org/ape) has moved on to version 0.45 alpha, and has an extremely beautiful “robot” demo. So, with the faster version of haXe, and improved knowledge, I though it was time to try porting it again. This time, I took a different approach – I wrote a program to do the porting for me. This has a few advantages. It allows for easy porting of future versions. It provides a list of things required, and it allows for modifications (such as the FPS counter) to be done only once (to the as3 code) and ported automatically to the haXe code.

[The full project can be found here.](https://hughsando.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/apeport-a045.zip) It contains source, conversion program and demos.

The timings for the calculations are as follows:

	Car Demo	Robot Demo
Original	2.0ms	9.5ms
haXe	2.04ms	12.1ms
hx->as3	2.3ms	24.1ms

Which I think is pretty good – except for the last entry – not sure what happened there.
Note that the haXe speed required a hack to avoid the “as” and “is” cast/query operators – and used a virtual function to achieve the same result in a neat way.

The conversion program is not a complex parser, rather a bunch of regular-expressions that relied on coding style as much as syntax. However, it worked pretty well in the end, once I got the “properties” sorted out – APE uses these quite a bit – and you must have “strong” types to use them in haXe. This program may be reusable to a small extent, but it pretty much tied to APE.

An outline of the porting tasks is as follows:

– Convert “int”, “void”, “Number” etc.
– Convert “package xxx {” to “package xxx;”.
– Expand out “import xxx.*” imports.
– Remove “private”, “final”, “internal” etc.
– Scan the class for “get” and “set” functions and insert “var prop(get_,set_):type” where appropriate. This was complicated by the fact that some of these were “override” properties and should not have this extra insertion. (I should have looked for the “override” keyword to make this easier).
– Add return statements to set functions.
– Fix POSITIVE_INFINITY.
– Make sure arrays are strongly typed – need this for properties.
– Change in-line array declarations when array is not of type Dynamic.
– Convert “indexOf” function in array.
– Convert “for(a ;b ;c )” to “a; while(b) { … c }”.
– Fix scoping of variables resulting from variables declared inside for statements.
– Add semi-columns to lines that needed them.
– Change constructors to “new”.
– Add static main function to main class, and “addChild” it.
– Call “super()” where required.
– Convert default-arguments to optional-arguments.
– Remove “break” from switch statements.
– Change “is” and “as” operators.

AS3 and haXe are reasonably close and with a consistent coding style, I think the automatic porting is a very viable option. If I had control over both sources, I would have done a few little things to the AS3 to make it slightly easier – ensure “;” on all lines, explicit call to super(), don’t double up on variable names inside for loops and other minor stuff. But the reg-ex engine makes most of these things pretty easy to work around.

Month: November 2007

Change a few lines, get a big speedup.

Porting APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) to haXe