New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

New Actionscript compiler from Adobe(bytearray.org)

70 points by boofar 13 years ago | 27 comments

If anyone is still interested in doing Flash development with Flex, do yourself a favor and check out Haxe:

The AS3 compiler in Flex is junk. My buglist over the three years I used it was nearly 100 items long. I don't know of a single unfixed issue in Haxe.

Plus, if you write the code properly, you can port it to nearly a dozen platforms (serverside, plus all of the ones on http://haxenme.org).

I don't make Flash games any more except for hobby projects, but migrating off of Flex was the best decision I ever made.

merdreubu 13 years ago | |

This is actually an entirely new compiler written from scratch since 2010.

https://cwiki.apache.org/FLEX/falcon-overview.html

reitzensteinm 13 years ago | | |

The problem with Flex wasn't its design, it was how buggy all of the edge cases were. Sound files randomly being replaced, weird compile errors that go away once you reset, code generation errors fixed by adding comments, occasional minute long compilation times, out of memory errors (again, reset the computer).

Frankly, complete rewrites under these circumstances are a cop out. It's an easy but ineffective path. What they should be doing is unit tests, isolating bugs and strictly controlling quality. Common bug reports should be triaged, rather than ignored (it's not uncommon to have a bug, and find a set of posts years old discussing workarounds). All it would take to fix Flex would be the will to do it.

The rewrite will have a whole different bunch of issues, and be similarly problematic. It's not like Flex was a bad apple in a bunch of well engineered Adobe software.

mrmiller 13 years ago | |

+1 for Haxe. One of the coolest projects happening right now, IMO. The community is awesome too. I'm just in love with it!

chipsy 13 years ago | |

I've been using Haxe for several years. I heartily recommend it, even outside of Flash and JS targets where it's strongest. The compiler is very solid. You can still expect to be filling in some gaps in library support - but the other side of that is that it's often very straightforward to appropriate code written for your target platform and use that instead.

Trufa 13 years ago | |

I'm generally against all in one tools/silver bullets, but haxe is getting so much good feedback I think I will give it a try at least!

Scene_Cast2 13 years ago |

Interesting. I should note that most of this stuff (optimization, etc) is available through Haxe. Haxe can also compile to Javascript, iOS & Android; targeting just Flash is risky at this point.

novalis 13 years ago | |

Just to add to this. For mobile compilation targets, Android, Blackberry, iOS and webOS, support is added through the Haxe NME framework: (www.haxenme.org/). Haxe doesn't provide those compilation targets on its own.

beggi 13 years ago | |

I'm surprised that when I look at Haxe's showcase (http://www.haxenme.org/showcase/) - most apps there are only available on a small subset of the platforms Haxe compiles to.

Same goes for the example apps I've seen at Corona's case studies (http://www.coronalabs.com/resources/case-studies/) and Appcelerator's Titanium showcase (http://www.appcelerator.com/thinkmobile/showcase). Admittedly most of Appcelerator's apps in the showcase are compiled for both platforms but they also have by far the smallest amount of showcase apps.

Brajeshwar 13 years ago |

Hmmm, Isn't this late by about 7 to 8 years. We've been asking, requesting and begging them, (while Flash was till with Macromedia) to improve the compiler, make it faster. One of the dreaded thing about Flash was that we have to wait for minutes while it compile. We dreaded the notion of pressing "Ctrl+Enter" on the keyboard.

MTASC by Nicolas Cannasse, came to our rescue and it was a good one - super fast. Nicolas is also behind haXe.

http://www.mtasc.org/ http://haxe.org/

arocks 13 years ago | |

Haxe is actually the "successor" to MTASC

keyle 13 years ago |

It all sounded so AWESOME, up until...

Known issues: Flex compilation is not supported.

So much for multi-threaded compiling. Pfff. I guess we will just wait until the open-source people do it, sometimes next year?

vjeux 13 years ago |

Non-linear control flow added to AS3 through a new 'goto' keyword.

deafbybeheading 13 years ago | |

I don't know what to make of this change. I always assumed goto was something you designed into your language from day one, rather than bolted on in day 4000 or so. Can someone more familiar with language design (or the target use cases--I presume high-performance game programming?) comment on this further?

scotth 13 years ago |

> A function can be inlined when the following constraints are met:

> ...

> * The function does not contain any activations

Does this mean that a function can't be inlined if it calls other functions?

strager 13 years ago | |

Activations are closures, in AS3 compiler parlance.

ender7 13 years ago |

This looks cool, but I'm afraid it's too little, too late. I've been pure Javascript for a long time now.

anovikov 13 years ago |

That's all nice, but where are the threads support we have been promised since years back?!

wgjordan 13 years ago | |

Just released last week in Flash Player 11.4: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/release-note/fp_114_air_...

89a 13 years ago |

Who cares?

The IDE is what needs demolishing and rebuilding properly.