Adobe Releases C/C++ To Flash Compiler

SnT2k writes "Adobe recently released the beta version of Alchemy which compiles C/C++ code into AS3 bytecode (which runs on AVM2) that can run on the Flash or Flex platform and boasts increased performance for computationally-intensive tasks (but still slower than native C/C++). It was demonstrated last year during the Chicago MAX 2007 to run Quake. A few months later it has been demonstrated to run a Python interpreter and Nintendo Emulator. One interesting tidbit is that the thing is built upon the open source LLVM Compiler Infrastructure."

Comments

Still no contact info, so I'll post here...

[TheRaven64]

On the off-chance that someone from Adobe reads this:

I've been interested in this idea since the presentation at the LLVM dev meeting. I'd be interested in extending clang to use the native ActionScript object model for Objective-C objects, and adding a GNUstep back end to use the native flash drawing primitives so that we can easily port Cocoa apps to run in a browser. Unfortunately, there was no contact information listed anywhere on the presentation or on this site, so I haven't been able to get in touch with anyone at Adobe Labs about this.

Re:Still no contact info, so I'll post here...

[garett_spencley]

I don't know first hand, but apparently horse meat is supposed to be very tasty. "The F-Word" (Gordan Ramsay cooking show in the UK) did an episode where they prepared horse meat, talked about the history of horses and talked to a farmer that raises them for their meat etc. It was really interesting.

In one part they were handing out samples near a horse-race track (they do that with lots of "exotic" foods. Go out into public and get people to try it and give their reactions etc.) and got asked by the police to leave. Not relevant but I thought it was funny.

-1 OT

It has been said

[frictionless man]

It has been said that the reason apple doesn't want flash on their iPhones is that it would create a competing application infrastructure over which they would have no control. I can see this development reinforcing that position.

This seems to further cement flash as a worthy application environment, especially given the perceived problem in flash appeared to be its inefficiency.
Looking forward to better flash games... (Or perhaps not if im not wanting to procrastinate).

Re:It has been said

[jcr]

the perceived problem in flash appeared to be its inefficiency.

I'd have to say that seeing Flash_enforceLocalSecurity() in the backtrace just about every time Safari crashes would be a somewhat bigger factor in Apple's rejection of Flash.

-jcr

Re:Quake. Quake for fucks sake!

[i.of.the.storm]

Well, I don't know whether Quake is that much of a benchmark. I can run Quake on my Nintendo DS through homebrew, and it was ported by one guy on his own, although I think he is a professional game developer for XBox 360, but I may be confusing him with someone else or may have misconstrued a forum post by him. Here's the site for anyone interested: http://quake.drunkencoders.com/

Increased performance

[shird]

compiling C/C++ code into AS3 bytcode (which runs on AVM2) that can run on the Flash or Flex platform and boasts increased performance for computationally-intensive tasks

Increased performance over what exactly? Is there some other 'slower' bytecode that the VM runs? The summary fails to mention this. I don't see how compiling C++ to the AS3 bytecode would be any faster than compiling some Flash language to AS3 bytecode, or writing AS3 bytecode directly. I assume it is the AS3 bytecode itself that is faster, in which case the 'compiling C++' part is irrelevant to the increased performance.

Re:Increased performance

[drspliff]

The point is that the LLVM project can do far more optimization before being compiled to bytecode than Adobe's ActionScript compiler is doing, and as a result it runs faster.
Yes... Adobe's ActionScript compiler sucks at generating bytecode for their own VM, and even they admit it.

This is not where Adobes priorities should be!

[NouberNou]

I have been working on two large enterprise class applications using their Flex/AIR framework and the performance is absolutely dismal!

The Flash VM is slow beyond belief when getting into large data-structures, event its native array parsing is incredibly slow.

Object instantiation is slower than molasses. We were averaging about 7 seconds to instantiate about 500 fairly complex objects that in most any other language, compiled or interpreted would have easily been created in a thousandth of that time.

The Flash VM's garbage collection is perfectly incapable of doing anything that involves long application run-times and leaks memory all over the place, even inside its native low-level components. It got to the point that even doing any proactive cleanup in our code was totally fruitless and I am sorry to add that a lot of the proactive steps we were taking have been left by the wayside because it is utterly hopeless to release all the memory you have taken back to the system.

Loading an SWF inside another SWF and then disposing of it will not stop the loaded SWF's playback and it does not release it from memory. Instead of Adobe fixing this obvious bug they just added a different method in Flash 10 called "unload and stop" or something like that. This requires anyone who wants to fix this issue to go back and refactor their code!

There are also numerous inconsistencies between applications that run in Flash and those that run in AIR, even though the code base is the same and the idea is that you do not have to change any obvious code to make it work in one platform or another.

Even flashes most basic function, doing vector drawings and animations fails horribly under load. We have had to hack and jury-rig numerous fixes in to compensate for Flash's seemingly random graphical glitches.

If Adobe wants to be taken seriously as a application platform developer, especially one that is used on the desktop they need to get their shit together because right now it feels like a childs toy or half-assed attempt to enter a new market.

Unfortunately the project, the client, and the management have chosen this path for us and we are stuck with it so I really hope that Adobe gets it together because its been a royal pain doing this sort of work on their platform.

Re:This is not where Adobes priorities should be!

[NouberNou]

Dude,

Have you stopped to think that maybe your code has something to do with it?

Yes, many times, and no I do not think my code is ever perfect, or even near perfect, but the proof is in the pudding, you can make very simple test cases and see very obvious drawbacks using just their code/UI components.

One of the problems with working with Flex is that sometimes you have to do things that seem incredibly retarded to get things done. Look at the extensive use of the callLater method in a lot of the Flex SDK code. This method basically says "ok things aren't done, so do it later." Not only does this seem to just patch a problem with not correctly sequencing your methods to fire when they are able to, but it creates huge memory leaks and is horribly hard to debug as you rarely can see past the point of the callLater in the stack.

This reminds me of another problem, in the fact that you can not catch run-time errors at the "root/base" level of the Flash/Flex/AIR application, and even better, if you do not have a debug version of Flash player (and forget it in AIR) then it just completely ignores the error and continues on as if nothing has happened. This then causes Flash to start chucking random errors and glitches that might get caught in your own try-catch blocks much, much later, and you will find that code that works perfectly under every imaginable situation is now glitching with really no known cause. Debugging can be quite the nightmare in Flash.

Re:Virtualize Everything

[pohl]

OK, sorry to be so hard on you. It turns out that there are copious buttloads of languages that use some sort of bytecode under the hood. The thing that really makes it stick in your mind with Java is just that it's the format that you're expected to distribute your programs in. Contrast that with Python: The reference implementation (CPython) is also a bytecode interpreter. I'm not sure, it may be possible to distribute a python program in bytecode, but I've neither seen nor heard of anyone doing it. Other interpreted languages are currently moving towards a bytecode-based implementation (Ruby is moving to YARV, Perl to Parrot...) and some implementations are even attempting to be self-hosting yet fast.

Google the term "PyPy", for example. It's a daring implementation of Python written in a strict subset of Python called RPython. It plans to use the LLVM infrastructure to eventually become competitive with the performance of the CPython interpreter. Pretty cool stuff!

A good Javascript isn't all that slow

[Morgaine]

Javascripts vary in quality, but the latest ones are pretty fast:  for example, Javascript V8 (the Javascript from Google's Chrome browser project) is nearly as fast as Lua, which is the fastest widely used scripting language at the moment.

Here are some basic timings I made just to give a rough feel for the relative speeds (don't read too much into them).  The first entry provides the timings for C, which is obviously compiled, purely as a basis for comparison with the scripting languages.  Note that the times for C are in milliseconds, while the rest are in seconds, lower is better:

Execution times for recursive F/P factorial(n) to /dev/null
Langs @ 2008     Times:  n=1         n=170       difference

C                      0.000 ms      0.090 ms      0.090 ms
Lua                    0.001 s       0.005 s       0.004 s
Parrot-opt/iterative   0.013 s       0.018 s       0.005 s
Parrot/iterative       0.014 s       0.019 s       0.005 s
V8-Javascript          0.007 s       0.013 s       0.006 s
Ocaml                  0.022 s       0.029 s       0.007 s
Python                 0.013 s       0.027 s       0.014 s
Parrot-opt/recursive   0.013 s       0.029 s       0.016 s
Mozilla-Javascript     0.001 s       0.018 s       0.017 s
Perl                   0.002 s       0.021 s       0.019 s
Nickle                 0.031 s       0.065 s       0.034 s
Parrot/recursive       0.014 s       0.056 s       0.042 s
Ruby                   0.041 s       0.095 s       0.054 s
Lua_on_Parrot          0.303 s       1.314 s       1.011 s

Although every scripting language is still at least some 50 times slower than compiled C, interpreters and language VMs in general have been improving steadily over recent years, and Javascript in particular is getting a lot of attention now, with more optimizations in the pipeline from all the major players.

The gap will shrink, guaranteed.

[Sorry about the Code posting mode, it's not very easy on the eyes ... but Slashdot no longer accepts the <pre> tag in HTML mode for displaying formatted output.]

Designflow -- Very Cool

[smcdow]

More details here: http://www.llvm.org/devmtg/2008-08/ (Look for the topic - Flash C Compiler: Compiling C code to the Adobe Flash Virtual Machine)

While scrolling down looking for the Adobe talk, I found this:

Designflow: using LLVM to compile to Hardware - This project uses LLVM to compile code to a mixed hardware and software implementation. This detects pieces of programs that may be efficiently compiled to VHDL and synthesized them onto an FPGA. The rest of the program is compiled to PowerPC code and uses to drive the FPGA. The system automatically handles data migration and other handshaking between the two systems.

Waaaayyyy more interesting than LLVM for flash. This is cool!!!