C/C++ to Flash Compiler

While browsing around Flash/Flex blogs, I stumbled on an interesting article from Ted – Extending Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR with C and C++ via ActionScript 3.

The interesting thing as told by Ted was that Adobe’s Engineers are working on an internal project which is sort of a cross-compiler for ActionScript allowing any c/c++ code to run in the Flash Player or Adobe AIR. This is a rather nerve racking feat and Ted have already written of many interesting implications for extending Adobe’s platform in terms of legacy code, programming languages, and other open source code libraries.

Part of this implementation includes a pattern in ActionScript that allows for “green threading” that supports executing synchronous code in the asynchronous ActionScript virtual machine. The work done here is quite groundbreaking and has highlighted quite a few performance improvements in the current virtual machine while expanding the capability of the platform.

Adobe engineers and hackers have ported the C++ version of Quake 1 engine into Flash Player and it worked perfectly and performed well. This is extreme engineering and an utmost over-the-top expectation from the Flash Player. What if multiplayer games can be played without even downloading a piece of it, right off the browser, have all the office tools working flawlessly right inside your browser – well, it is rather limitless of what you can do; think of it and it might just be possible.