Comments on: Leaving The Sandbox

By: Twitter Trackbacks for Leaving The Sandbox at blog.joa-ebert.com – Blog of Joa Ebert [joa-ebert.com] on Topsy.com

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:36:04 +0000

[...] Leaving The Sandbox at blog.joa-ebert.com – Blog of Joa Ebert blog.joa-ebert.com/2009/06/19/leaving-the-sandbox – view page – cached Actionscript3, Flash, Java, C#, C++, Algorithms & Imageprocessing — From the page [...]

By: Alan Shaw

Alan Shaw — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:27:49 +0000

Very exciting stuff in terms of improving tools for Flash developers.. just thinking, you could probably make an abc Forth compiler as a side project. Wouldn’t take too much of your spare time :)

By: joa

joa — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:10:46 +0000

Kevin: It does not matter who compiled the original input SWF. It would work for haXe, ASC or future compilers. Although, you have to specify/load all external libraries you used to link against (e.g. playerglobal.swc) for the typing system. This is only in terms of haXe a little bit strange, where you do not have a playerglobal.swc — so you would need the Flex SDK or at least the Flash Player builtin libraries in addition. You could also check out Tamarin and use the builtin.abc, toplevel.abc and playerglobal.abc.

wonderwhy-er: I have choosen Java for this task. Having an ActionScript 3 library for this could be fun, but compiling an executable or interacting with Ant/Maven is an awkward task considering the fact that you have to run the AVM+ to allow direct file I/O without the use of AIR.
Doing this with Java was painful enough since you do not have unsigned data types etc. but this logic is just placed in Input- and OutputStream implementations.

By: frank

frank — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:06:49 +0000

very looking forward to your FOTB talk… sounds like amazing results.

By: djandrew

djandrew — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:31:28 +0000

I think my brain just exploded. Awesome work dude, can’t wait to see what can be done with this kind of optimization.

By: wonderwhy-er

wonderwhy-er — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:09:12 +0000

Very interesting.

But I have a question. What you use as a platform for this tool? AIR? Java? .Net? C++?

I am thinking on making a SWF compiler/decompiler and ABC optimizer written on AS3 (hopefully without need of AIR). Possibilities for usage of it would be endless.

By: Kevin Newman

Kevin Newman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:38:22 +0000

This is cool stuff. Maybe the HaXe folks would be interested in this too?

By: Mike Welsh

Mike Welsh — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:24:39 +0000

Hi Joa,

Great work! This kind of code analysis opens up great possibilities for bytecode optimization. Hopefully one day the dumb AS compiler will be able to perform these kind of optimizations on its generated AVM bytecode. The possibility of cross-compiling JVM bytecode is intriguing, too.

By: Paul Gregoire

Paul Gregoire — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:59:41 +0000

Sounds really cool, but over my head technically. I do like the fact that you dont hate java. :)