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New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

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Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#11

Post by Trufa »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #2

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 d…

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!

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#12

Post by OzzyB »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #10
merdreubu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually an entirely new compiler written from scratch since 2010. https://cwiki.apache.org/FLEX/falcon-overview.html

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. Wh…

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.

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#14

Post by 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/

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#16

Post by arocks »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #14

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 i…

Haxe is actually the "successor" to MTASC

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#17

Post by farseer »

OzzyB wrote: post #12
reitzensteinm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Wh…

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.

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.

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#19

Post by beggi »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#20

Post by chipsy »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #2

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 d…

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.
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