Found a GM topic here: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=604444
Some users basically tried to measure several different variable read/write performances. So I though I could compare to ENIGMA. Sadly I don't have YYC so I can't test it, and comparing to regular GM wouldn't really be fair. So this is YYC from the topic:
(http://s22.postimg.org/lxvp1x1up/Windows_YYC.png)
So here is ENIGMA:
(http://i.imgur.com/Z7u4Yd6.png)
It does seems we are faster at few and slower at others. Comparing the two isn't correct though, as the YYC result wasn't done on my PC. But I do believe some of the iterative methods we have now are indeed slower than YYC could have (as theirs could be coded better, as it is few years newer as well). Just for comparison here is what happens when the "var" is replaced by "int" (so when we declare the type):
(http://i.imgur.com/N3T84dL.png)
We can see that all of the ones which previously used "var" and were slow are now A LOT faster. Some went from 3000us to 0us (to it was not even measurable) while others went from 115000us to 7000us (16x speedup).
Many others didn't change because I can't override things like built-in variables to use int. So I changed only the ones having specific "var" declaration. I also changed the string, so you can actually see which ones were changed. So look for the ones having "int" in the name.
So while there are things we should improve engine wise, we still have the ability to define variables that give a massive speedup. And I encourage people to use them.
This topic was created in the "series" of the other topics involving variables.
Here is result by replacing every "var" with "variant":
(http://i.imgur.com/Z7UF8zs.png)
I actually thought that it is the same thing. But variant is actually faster in almost every case.
The benchmark should actually be written better, but I didn't want to modify it so we could compare to GM. We could make it so we can compare with different ENIGMA types though.