Want it fast?
Probably you’ve already heard about Adobe Alchemy, if you haven’t, here’s quick sum up: Alchemy is a tool to cross-compile pure C/C++ to a SWF for the Flash player 10. If you want to know more about it, just go to the Labs and follow the links. What’s really interesting is this:
…performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0…
Luckily for us, what’s interesting to me is a challenge for the so-called man that never sleeps, Nicolas Cannasse. How come you could create faster SWFs with Alchemy? At the end of the day it’s just a SWF, right? Well, it’s not. Alchemy SWFs use parts of the AVM2 that “regular” SWFs don’t use.
It didn’t take long to Nicolas to come up with the haXe solution: the Virtual Memory API. So from haXe you can use this new API that outputs the same bytecode as Alchemy does, therefore you get super-fast SWFs. Veeeeeery cool. Or very cool if you are an haXe developer.
And this is my point. How weird it is that there’re 2 ways of producing fast SWFs but none of them is officially supported by Adobe? One is in the labs, the other one is haXe. Now put yourself in the shoes of a Papervision or Away3D developer. It sucks. Those projects (and many others) need to squeeze the player till the very last drop of performance. And when you are talking about 30-40% performance boost…. it’s a big deal.
On the bright side, Adobe keeps improving the AVM2 and that’s always good for everybody, haXe developer or not!