I've been lately having conversations with some people about "fast SWFs" and always came to the same question:
what's Adobe waiting for? Alchemy has been around for +2 years and still there's no official way to use the Alchemy opcodes that give you extra performance. Adobe has released FP 10.1 and will release 10.2 sometime soon, and haven't heard absolutely anything about
Alchemy coming up.
On top of the options
I wrote about back in 2008 now there's a third way of accessing those hidden FP APIs:
Apparat. So you can use Alchemy, haXe and Apparat but you cannot use an officially supported API. I don't think this is because those Flash Player APIs are not stable, they are. Projects like the
AudioTool wouldn't be possible without them.
So why is Adobe not pushing for this? With 10.1 and the Flash Player running on Android devices there is the need more than ever to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the player. Does Adobe feel providing ActionScript APIs for this would require a new version of the language? Well, vectors were added without taking it to AS4 or at least AS3.1 (which should've happened IMHO).
Even if Adobe doesn't see a market for Alchemy itself (doubt it, take a look at the
forums or the
Flash WebM decoder by Ralph Hauwert), adding ActionScript APIs for the Alchemy opcodes shouldn't be too hard?