Great Post! Very informative.

What about a post compiler that parses the swf file and replaces the call of the writeByte wrapper with the bytecode? Additionally it could do some optimizations like inlineing math functions.

michael

I’m working on a project, heavy memory reading-writing involved. I use Flex CL compiler to compile my .SWFs, but would love to get the most out of AVM2 ( even if this means to get hands dirty with alchemy ).

Looks like a looong road ahead…
Cheers,
the-bam

One man – Nicolas could develop such a big platform or solution able to deal with swf format more eficient way.
Now we see clearly the point the swf and AVM2 with all of limitation is the key. Have you thing about what culd happend to the AS3 developers or even designers if any other competitor (SL JavaFX) on this market could really provide better solution? GPU acceleration, clear and easy Drawing API with GPU as well, multi threading and efficiency close to the cpp and finally designer/developer-friendly IDE… it would be disaster for Flash platform and huge leak of talented guys.

Because Macromedia/Adobe itself learned us from 10 years how to do better and better stuff.
A lot of guys become developers even if they started from designer background only.
Thanks to this technology and fact that because designer and developer worlds could met in one place.
Is anyone here thinking that designers are going to work so close with pure cpp development as with Flash could do?
Whatever it is, game, website, application. However we still need more because as we can follow the Flash features flash could follow the technology trends around. But in the same time keep it simple and intuitive for us.

Fortunately or not, nor of competitors could change our way … yet. But as we know SL did big storm on this sea few years ago. Think about different scenario. Don’t you thing if someone like Nicolas could develop brand new solution as a platform with this whole stuff above in mind and target to Flash Developers/ Designers? Make it more elegant, efficient and just have a chance avoid all of these bad experience and disappointments in the middle? Is it so difficult? We need another 10 years to promote brand new file extension? Personally I don’t think so. And guy like Nicolas just inspired me to thing this way.
10 years ago was few guys around to play with flash 5. Now we are talking about potentially more than 1milion active development community. If they’ll got something more robust to deal with it will take few months to do revolution and news about this will spread the world as quick as client will be able to pay for new version of Quake on-line with GPU support. And as easy as you can do any stuff in AS3 or haXe. My conclusion is technology and standards are belong to us, developers who can follow or not the trends. If you think is not like that just go backwards 10 years and think what you though about many things, how many technologies died because no one picked it up. Only big companies job is to make you believe is only one way and cover-up the core of the invention. Sometimes is worth to reinvent the wheel.

So in terms of native, I do think ActionScript is the first up. Even though other compilers and languages can follow up. That is, until Adobe decides on what to do with what the player actually is targeted by. If they take that wider, then that would change things. But for now, I feel assured that they are taking the path of ActionScript. Gumbo and the effort on the language (MXML could be called a language in this context) don’t point to anything else.

haXe would be just as “native” to AVM2, as ActionScript 3. Just because Adobe decided to use ECMAScript flavour to compile into AVM2, does not make it their “native” language or make it AVM2s “native” language.

My $.02, of course.

At one point, you say “it’s still not legal to modify the asc.jar and release”
Well, that’s just what I did with this project
http://www.victordramba.com/?p=31

I wonder, will they come after me?

Cheers

Also thnx for sharing your project findings with us, will help us save the crunch time!

@Robert M. Hall Yes, in AS2 there where more options. I actually kind of fond of the AS3 DoABC tags, they are very well structured, although a bit hard to get too at first. Nicolas is definitely a master on that one. Looking forward to see you man!

@Chris Allen Yes, I’d love to see an AS3 target for Haxe; but it would defy the purpose of being able to cater to a better compiler, with more optimized output. What Alchemy and Haxe can do are testaments what can be achieved, and I’m getting more and more convinced that it’s the combination of the language and compiler not getting any real big upgrades. Maybe FP11 would show us a new path. Also, I’m really curious where Adobe will be taking AS4.

@Nicolas good to hear the team is that strong. It was in no means intended in a bad way, but it is an honest observation. It’s a stark contrast to have a big corporate team working on this, and at the same time seeing the awesomeness of Haxe / Alchemy which are manned by much smaller teams, but pushing the platform further. The corporate backing is what makes it more “firm” imho, but when things get more standardized, we might see things change ?

@liuhuan @dim thank you both.

Nikolas and Ralf – i’m yours fan ! damn ! ! !