I’m gonna cheat today since it is really late, as I spent a good amount of time organizing the 3D Engines update which pushed me a bit behind, and I’m also exhausted. Instead of writing some more content, I’m just linking to the “Utilized Optimization Techniques” section of the 3D Engines project, which I put up today.
It describes 4 programming speed optimization tricks: Local variable assignment, precalculating index lookups, pointer transversing/addition, and loop unrolling. This project post also goes into some differences between the used languages [Flash, C++, and Java], especially when dealing with speed.