Slashdot Mirror
The Next Browser Scripting Language Is — C?
mad.frog writes to tell us that in a recent talk by Adobe's Scott Petersen he demonstrated a new toolchain that he has been working on (and soon to be open-sourced) that allows C code to be run by the Tamarin virtual machine. "The toolchain includes lots of other details, such as a custom POSIX system call API and a C multimedia library that provides access to Flash. And there's some things that Petersen had to add to Tamarin, such as a native byte array that maps directly to RAM, thereby allowing the VM's "emulation" of memory to have only a minor overhead over the real thing. The end result is the ability to run a wide variety of existing C code in Flash at acceptable speeds. Petersen demonstrated a version of Quake running in a Flash app, as well as a C-based Nintendo emulator running Zelda; both were eminently playable, and included sound effects and music."
Nope. SFX is generally event driven (hit a key, hear the sword swing) where music is not (enter an area and music plays continuously in the background).
SFX requires timing, latency, and speed to be accurate. Music requires bandwidth and a minimum level of continuous CPU cycles.
Both have different needs so you can have one without the other (when you are talking emulation).
GPL Deconstructed
If the "byte array mapped to RAM" installed in Tamarin allows the code to store anywhere in the interpreter's space, that's a huge security hole. It can do anything the user process can do. If you're going to allow that, you may as well just load executable machine code directly, as with Active-X.
Anyway, the article is a blog post that rehashes an interview from last year. The info in that article is better.
The last time I checked, Adobe Systems is about as hostile to open source as possible. They are the seldom acknowledged masters of the "first hit on the crack pipe is free" scheme.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/air.html
Multiple helper libraries licensed under the MPL doesn't change the fact they are promoting another information silo.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Nope. SFX is generally event driven (hit a key, hear the sword swing) where music is not (enter an area and music plays continuously in the background).
SFX requires timing, latency, and speed to be accurate. Music requires bandwidth and a minimum level of continuous CPU cycles.
Both have different needs so you can have one without the other (when you are talking emulation).
In Parappa the Rapper, Beatmania, Guitar Freaks, Drummania, Keyboard Mania, Frequency, Amplitude, Taiko Drum Master, Donkey Konga, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and even scenes in the Mario Party and WarioWare series, the player triggers sound effects at specific times, and these sound effects represent music that the player is performing. If the background music becomes desynchronized from the sound effects that represent music, the emulated environment becomes unusable. Even games that aren't directly about performing music, such as Rez, Lumines, and some scenes in Super Mario RPG, indicate the timing of various game world events using the music.
Hooray! Now C programmers can join the fun of writing sluggish applications that eat up huge amounts of CPU even when they're doing nothing!
Deceptive headline, too, as this is just about compiling C to the bytecode that the Flash player interprets. Or even worse, now that I RTFA: "The LLVM instructions are converted into opcodes for a custom Virtual Machine that runs in ActionScript, a variant of ECMAScript and sibling of JavaScript." So your C is compiled to bytecode, that is interpreted by an interpreter that is, itself, a stream of the Flash player's bytecode.
Moore's Law notwithstanding, this is a pretty insane use of processor cycles, guaranteed to make your program run a couple orders of magnitude slower than it would if you actually compiled it, or rewrote it in Actionscript!
egypt urnash minimal art.
especially when the proprietary part is very large and complex (eg Java)
You're about 3 years out of date on calling Java proprietary, kiddo. In case you forgot, it's been GPLed for over a year now.
See The Better String Library. Haven't used it myself, but it's supposedly very portable, high performance, and has good interoperability with normal null terminated C strings.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.