Juan Pablo Califano wrote: > If you mean decompiling the push method itself, you can't because it's not > actioscript but a native code, implemented directly in the player.
Nice work, Juan Pablo. The code you have been posting prompts me to comment on the underlying mechanism of Flash. I know, from experience, that a lot of Flash coders (and Director, and Java) don't understand about bytecode vs. native code. If you're writing in a true compiled language like C++, your code will compile to machine language specific to your CPU. Machine code is 1's and 0's, the on/off switches that are the basis of any binary computer. Flash is cross-platform, though. It has to work on Intel processors, PowerPC, and others. It has to work on different OS's like Windows, Mac, and Unix. The machine code is different for every processor, and the implementation is specific to an OS. So, the Flash compiler can't compile to machine code. Instead, Macromedia, and now Adobe, have written a player for each of the supported platforms. The player is in machine code (ones and zeros), but our ActionScript code is not. ActionScript compiles to an intermediate bytecode, or token. The player reads these tokens, and executes the appropriate machine code. That's what makes Flash slower than C++, and also more secure--it's much more difficult to write malicious code if you don't have direct access to the machine, but have to go through an interpreter. This idea has been around for 25 years or so. The first implementation I used was UCSC Pascal, which, like Flash, compiled down to an intermediate token which was, in turn interpreted and executed by the player (we called it a "virtual machine" back then). It has only been in the last 10 years or so that machines have gotten fast enough to run this sort of code satisfactorily. If you understand this, you can find the bottlenecks in your code more easily, and optimize it. Loops are often the main culprit, as they have to interpret the bytecode each time through the loop. Also, if you're working with something with a fixed length like an array or XML nodes (really the same thing), it's faster if you store the length of the array in a register variable. An illustration: var arrLen:int; arrLen = myArray.length(); for (var i:int; i < arrLen; i++) works faster than for (var i:int; i < myArray.length(); i++) Cordially, Kerry Thompson _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
