Revision as of 21:34, 15 December 2015

mIRC is not considered a fast language and, more often than not, the easiest implementation is not the fastest.

The following tips will help to increase the execution speed of a script. Most will have a very marginal speed advantage and may not be worth consideration outside of long-running script blocks such as loops.

Alias Bypassing

When calling any form of command or identifer mIRC will attempt to find a scripted version prior to looking for a native equivalent. This functionality can be bypassed by prefixing commands with ! and by inserting a ~ after the $ of identifers.

This bypasses mIRC looking for a scripted echo alias:

!echo -a example1
.!echo -a example2

This bypasses mIRC looking for a scripted me alias¹:

echo -a $~me

¹: Even though mIRC will use its own native identifers over custom aliases of the same name, there is still some pre-evaluation that can be bypassed using the above method.

Conditions

Best to worst:

if (condition) command

if condition { command }

if (condition) { command }

if-else vs $iif()

$iif() is much slower than using an if-else statement. When $iif() is encounter it is first rearranged into an if-else statement and the result is evaluated.

Best to worst:

var %result = condition_false_value
if (condition) var %result = condition_true_value

if (condition) var %result = condition_true_value
else var %result = condition_false_value

var %result = $iif(condition, condition_true_value, condition_false_value)

/tokenize & $n vs $gettok()

For successive¹ calls against the same data, it is faster to use /tokenize and $n over $gettok().

;; faster than using $gettok(a b c, 1, 32) $gettok(a b c, 2, 32)
tokenize 32 a b c
echo -a $1 $2

¹: even with just two references against the same input, tokenizing is faster than using $gettok

[]'s vs $() vs $eval

Best to worst:

[ eval_statement ]

$(eval_statement, 2)

$eval(eval_statement, 2)