SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Awesome cant wait to see more of your stuff!

Ive tried a lot of languages This is Basic as fast as 'C' in a nutshell!

Baggey

Ha well spotted. This is the code I was optimising: https://www.syntaxbomb.com/worklogs/load-animated-gifs-as-class/msg347064333/#msg347064333

I noticed someone on the purebasic forum said: "As interesting as this video is, I was amazed at how he optimised by reshuffling existing code and did not first perform any analysis of whether the algorithms used could be improved upon.
 Basically, he did what a good compiler would be able to do, but nothing more."

I did have quick a look at the main algorithm and it seemed OK, but I didn't do a deep dive into it because I am working on a commercial game and needed to speed this code up and move on. Also the main algorithm is well-established and documented and I *hoped* that the original BlitzMax programmer did a good job of it (this could be a false assumption). A second programmer had written the wrapper for it. I'm not sure who wrote what.

Outside of the main core algorithm I spotted that I could: a) replace the file-based stream function calls with a RAMStream, and in fact I could also just use my own array of memory with pointer in some places, b) inline and optimise a bunch of the very frequently called supporting functions e.g. the stack function.

By the time I got to 3x faster, it was good enough for my purposes! So I moved on.

This is a good mindset. Knowing when enough is enough, keeping your eye on the end goal instead of getting easily distracted by a potential small side project of optimising the code to the maximum.

If you experience issues down the line during development then you can optimise more. Premature optimisation is a painful waste of time.