When to null and when to delete

programming flash
1

Hi everyone,

I recently bumped into an issue in the Flash IDE that you may be able to shed some light on for me.

As I drag a movieclip around the stage, an enterFrame event listener is fired.
For each enterFrame that fires, a point is placed onto the stage, stored into an array and the event.updateAfterEvent() method is called.

var p:MyPoint = new MyPoint(x,y);
parent.addChild§;
myArray.push§;

which is a MovieClip in my library containing a cross.

On stopDrag, the enterFrame is removed. The myArray:Array is for each looped and the MyPoint objects are removed from the stage.

for each(var p:MyPoint in stack){
//trace out the class type, cool huh;
//trace(getQualifiedClassName§);
trace(p.name);

            parent.removeChild(p);
        }

The array is reset.

myArray = [];

My question is coming. In the IDE, when I compile to test, after a few drags the whole thing starts to grind and churn, making me think there is a garbage collection issue, and that the removeChild was not enough to get rid of the references to these MovieClips.

I dug around in google for a while, read some Senocular pages (you know how it is), and found that you need to null references to the MovieClips.

I like encapsulation, but if I have to remove the MovieClips from the parent inside my class, how can I then null them. I can’t get to them any more through the parent.

I tried this:

for each(var p:MyPoint in stack){
//trace out the class type, cool huh;
//trace(getQualifiedClassName§);
trace(p.name);

            parent.removeChild(p);
            p = null;
        }

But it still churned.

Then

I debugged the app, causing the movie to play in the Flash Player outside of the IDE, and the movie ran smoothly without any grinding or slowing down.

So, question 1 is this:
Has anybody experienced the same slowing down in IDE but not in standalone Flash player?

And question 2 is this:
When should you use ‘delete movieClip;’ and when should you use movieClip = null?
I read about class properties and dynamic references or something, but I don’t understand what the difference is?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks for reading!

Plumper than thou