Introducing JITB — a Flash Player Built On the JVM

MBCook writes "Joa Ebert has started working on a new program called JITB. Announced in a talk at FITC San Fran, it's a Flash player written to use the Java JVM to run ActionScript, and in a simple graphics test case (making 1 million calls to flash.geom.Point) was 30x faster than Adobe's Flash player. There is an impressive demo video on YouTube showing the point test."

Comments

Re:Adobe has one

[Adambomb]

Semi-closed platforms

Semi?

Don't talk till you hit full compatibility.

[spinkham]

This means very little. Anyone can make a subset of a language faster then a full implementation.

The Ruby world has been through this recently: Someone comes out with a fantastic runtime that supports 1/8 of the ruby language, and it's 10x faster then everything else!

There's lots of hype, but as development continues the other runtimes get 2x faster, and the new magic runtime gets 5x slower by actually supporting the whole language, and the new magic runtime is now the same speed as the rest of the field, with less compatibility and more memory usage.

So color me skeptical, until this runtime supports the whole language, including transparent overlays and all the stuff that the Adobe guys claim makes Flash slow.

Even the author of this article will tell you this. He recently added:

Update: Please do not think that this implementation is 30x faster than the Flash Player developed by Adobe. One(!) microbenchmark is never a number you should count on. I would like to make clear that I never said this.

That being said, If we're stuck with Flash for at least the near term, I'd like to see projects like this, Gordon, and Smokescreen take off and perhaps improve our choices in runtimes. I just don't expect magic.