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New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

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Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#21
post #17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A classic early bug that lost me hours and hours:

  if(true)  // i've forced this to true now
  {

     // this code is never reached because of that comment on the if() line

  }

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#22
post #5

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

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?

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#24
post #17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#25
post #17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have 3 years doing full time Flex development. Have yet to see these problems. We deploy to Windows/Linux and Flash Player has been the closest to write once/run anywhere that we've seen. We have nothing but good things to say about Flex development.

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#26
post #24
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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/jQu…

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.

Re: New Actionscript compiler from Adobe

#27
post #21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A classic early bug that lost me hours and hours: if(true) // i've forced this to true now { // this code is never reached because of that comment on the if() line }

Please ... tell me you are joking.

Edit: I don't disbelieve you just, wow, that is amazingly bad.

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