Question: Does code order affect large compiled scripts?

[RooperGee]

Hello,

     Just a quick question.  I have a script that's around 15,000 lines and contains at least 100 different functions.  Will moving my functions that are most frequently accessed to the beginning of the script make it execute any faster once compiled?  Just want to know if it's worth the time to rearrange code.  Thanks!

[R0G]

When functions are not inlined, yes there is a performance hit to make a function call. However, it's such a minuscule hit that only extremely high performance code is going to worry about function calls. And on those kinds of projects, the code is typically written in assembly.

Source

[mLipok]

Here is really good question to you:

Quote

If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.
H. James Harrington

I bet that somewhere you have a poorly written function, which causes a lot of unnecessary code or simply are there unnecessarily functions SLEEP, or finally performed operations just they take and will be took up an appropriate amount of time.
So you just have to measure it.

As to your question:  This depends how you wrote your code.
But you should to rewrite code inside functions (not only sorting functions).

 

[Melba23]

RooperGee,

Given the overall speed (or rather lack of it) of AutoIt code, I very much doubt that the position of a function within the script will greatly affect execution time. Given the interpreted nature of the script even when "compiled" I would think that the overhead is minimal compared to the time taken by the code within the function itself. This is only a personal opinion and, as usual. I am more than ready to be corrected if someone can produce a script which proves the opposite.

However from personal experience I have found that the order of Cases within a Switch (and so presumably also within a Select) structure can have a major effect on execution time when it is called very frequently - e.g. in your GUIGetMsg loop or in a  handler for a very common Windows event such as WM_NOTIFY. As the Cases are checked in order, it makes sense to put the most time-critical ones towards the beginning of the structure. When I was developing the colour code in my GUIListViewEx UDF I managed to speed up the drawing of coloured ListViews significantly by moving the checks for control redraw notification codes (only used for the colour events) to the beginning of the handler Switch structure rather than at the end where I had originally placed them during early testing.

M23