I am so happy — this year I will speak at FITC Toronto! And it is for me the first conference outside of Europe. So what will it be about? It is the first release and session about my currently nameless inline compiler. This tool allows you to write and debug bytecode by writing ActionScript. It includes also a lot of other nifty features like method injection — which is by the way a real killer-feature. If you do not understand it right now don’t worry: you will love it!
The compiler is currently in a working state (although I finally have to support bytecode 0×1b) and I am implementing several optimization techniques. This is not so easy but I hope to find some solutions to enable branch elimination, constant folding and loop unrolling (which is already getting pretty close) to name a few.
I do not want to spoil the fun so any updates are kept private until the FITC for now.
I’m very excited about the AS3 inline compiler! I’m not sure how it will work, but it would be great if it was possible to use right inside of Flex Builder or similar. Also integrated with your preprocessor method :) I’m wondering if there is a good way to do inline functions as well, because it seems like you would have to make them macros which is a pain.
Related to your assembler, I was wondering if you plan to include some code obfuscation features eventually? For things like breaking decompiler output. I am working on a variable/class renaming obfuscator in Ruby, which I would like to open source when it is working.
BTW: enthusiASM wouldn’t be a bad name for the assembler :)
__inline(); is the magical function you call from ActionScript to tell the compiler that the current method should be inlined wherever possible. And it works very well with FDT/FlexBuilder. Also the debugger is available. It is very nice to follow also the jumps etc. in the debugger.
Actually FDT works best with the compiler because they implemented a special feature called “Post-Compile ANT”. You may guess who was struggling to get that one in there, hehe. But an obfuscator is not planned for now.
Hey Joa
Great news!
Look forward to seeing you speak here in Toronto!
Joa, it looks like you won! Oh well, the community will get a lot of use out of this… good work man.
Hey Joa, I’m from Peru and I’ll be traveling to Canada for FITC too, hope to see you there and interchange ideas!
–Erik