When Flash Player 10 was released, you heard about this new Vector class, if you are not using it already in your FP10 projects, well you definitely should. When talking with some guys at DotEmu, they confessed me that their whole emulation engine (ported from Java to AS3) which was able to emulate any kind of 8bit and 16bit console was not fast enough to be used in production in Flash Player 9.

When Flash Player 10 was released, they switched from Array to Vectors and realized that their engine was running much faster thanks to methods like BitmapData.setVector() and the Vector class.

After a few days I realised that the JPEG encoding class used in the corelib package was using a lot of Arrays and could benefit from the Vector class and I was pretty sure some tricky optimization could be done. That's what I did and modified its code to make it faster, I was happy to see that the new version was around 2.5 times faster (on my machine).

Here is a little demo (encoding a 2880*2880 BitmapData) showing the difference between the old version and the new one, if you