

New Actionscript compiler from Adobe - boofar
http://www.bytearray.org/?p=4789

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

<http://haxe.org/>

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

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

~~~
reitzensteinm
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.

~~~
OzzyB
Did you ever see that movie where that guy suddenly wakes up in a pool of
sweat gasping for air because of that nightmare sequence?

That's me when I remind myself of Flex development.

~~~
farseer
Same here!! One of my startups failed because we chose Flex/AIR as the
development platform. Nearly tripled our development time, working around bugs
in the platform.

~~~
ivanb
I've been writing in ActionScript 3/Flex for more than 3 years now and I don't
really understand your problems. There never was a compiler bug that
completely prevented me from doing my work. There always were easy workarounds
to everything. The community is huge. I could always find the answer either by
reading the documentation or googling.

Sincerely, compared to C++/Qt/WxWidgets, Python/Qt, Swing and even HTML/jQuery
Adobe Flex was the most productive environment for frontend and desktop
development for me.

It sounds that you did not have a prior experience in Flex otherwise you would
know the kinks of the platform. I would say that it was not the choice of Flex
that killed your startup but the uniformed choice of a technology that you
never had a prior experience with.

~~~
farseer
3 years huh? I reckon you have never worked with Flex 2/3 then? The incident I
am quoting is over 4 years old and I understand things may have improved with
Flex 4. Specifically the Spark library drastically improved UI performance.
However for us early adapters its too little too late. A Java backend with a
Swing or HTML/JS front end is the safest route to go when programming for
multiple platforms.

------
Scene_Cast2
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
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.

------
Brajeshwar
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
Haxe is actually the "successor" to MTASC

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

~~~
deafbybeheading
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
> 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
Activations are closures, in AS3 compiler parlance.

------
ender7
This looks cool, but I'm afraid it's too little, too late. I've been pure
Javascript for a long time now.

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

~~~
wgjordan
Just released last week in Flash Player 11.4: [http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-
player/release-note/fp_114_air_...](http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-
player/release-note/fp_114_air_34_release_notes.html#overview)

------
89a
Who cares?

The IDE is what needs demolishing and rebuilding properly.

