LoanShark is a flexible and high-performance object pooling utility, written in AS3. It is battle-hardened, fully unit tested and actively maintained.

PLEASE NOTE: This repo is no longer maintained. However, despite the fact that Flash is officially defunct, the AS3 code here is actually useful since it is the most test-covered object pooling utility available and AS3 projects may still be built using the Harman AIR SDK for building mobile apps, or old Flash projects brought back to life using https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/ for web/desktop.

How to use it

Especially useful with custom classes that are heavy to construct, simply instaniate a LoanShark instance, passing in your class of choice. You can then borrowObject and returnObject at will, the LoanShark will manage the reuse and allocation of objects in an efficient manner - making lighter work for your garbage collector:

import org.kissmyas.utils.loanshark.LoanShark;

var pool:LoanShark = new LoanShark(SomeClass);
var someInstance:SomeClass = pool.borrowObject();
pool.returnObject(someInstance);

A bunch of other options are available. Just check out the code to find out how to do:

• Pool size pre-allocation
• Pruning the pool of unused objects and flushing the pool of all objects
• Adding reset and dispose method calls on pooled objects
• Maximum pool wastage prune triggering
• Listening for events from the pool
• Exception triggers with strict mode

Examples

• Create a pool of Bitmaps, which all wrap the same BitmapData, by default

// Given any BitmapData
var bitmapData:BitmapData;

// Create a pool a Bitmap objects, with 'bitmapData' as the default init object
var pool:LoanShark = new LoanShark(Bitmap, false, 0, 0, bitmapData);

// You can get as many Bitmaps from the pool as necessary
var bitmap:Bitmap = pool.borrowObject();
addChild(bitmap);

// When done with it, recycle it back into the pool
pool.returnObject(removeChild(bitmap));