So We’ll Just Build Your Site in C++ Then, Thanks
By Roger Braunstein | on October 3, 2007
In Flash, OMGWTFBBQ | 13 Comments
Check out Peter Elst’s collection of Sneek Peek sessions from MAX. I’m on the verge of tears looking at Scott Peterson’s C/C++ on Flash demonstration. What… the… hell. He seems to indicate that he’s written a C++ to AS3 translator, not a C++ compiler that targets ABC. Peterson mentions including scripting hosts for other languages into the AVM, so you could run PHP or Ruby or whatever inside a SWF. Why not? I’m really interested to see how one would implement multithreading in a performant way… you could always chunk up your translated AS3 code into equal sized blocks, managing your scope and running only one block per frame, but how would you tune this to the speed of your processor dynamically, doing more or less code per frame to fully utilize your available CPU time? No idea. Then he proceeds to shit everyone’s pants by showing his AS3 translation of Quake I. Now this baffles me. At some point he simply must have replaced one of the display libraries with a for-Flash-Player BitmapData adapter library. And the sound control seems even more improbable to have been ported automatically. Anyway, this seems completely outrageous. I thirst for more information. I’d love to read a much more detailed article on how Scott approached this; whether he really let the AS3 compiler do all that work, or how much he dug into the AVM itself. But for now, I have to pick up my jaw from the floor, please excuse me.
If you watched the video from our previous post, you no doubt have heard of Hydra and AIF - the new image processing language for Adobe products including Astro. I’ve since downloaded the AIF Toolkit and played around with it and found it’s surprisingly simple. I made my first Hydra patch which is admittedly basic but only took me about half an hour to put together. Check it out below!
Are You Sitting Down? You’d Better Sit Down.
By Roger Braunstein | on October 1, 2007
In Flash, Hydra, News, OMGWTFBBQ | 2 Comments
Adobe demos new features of Astro/Flash Player 10 at MAX. Credit goes to Aral for the video.