Oliver Steele wrote:
The platform currently supports inline assembly (inside the #pragma), but I don't know whether this will survive the compiler port to Java.
Is there an example somewhere for how to do this?
If it doesn't, I'll add a description to the wiki of how to find the old implementation and the documentation for it, so that an interested party can revive it.
That would be great.
Are your experiences with inline assembly for swf5, or with (later versions of) swf6 and higher? Our experience with inline assembly was that it was useful for swf5, but that replacing it with JavaScript improved the performance once we targeted swf6, since there were so many registers to allocate to.
My experience is with Flash 8. Although the registers are much faster than variables, the stack is even faster yet. In our applications, we really want to push the edge of what Flash can do for us, so eventhough we unroll loops manually and try to optimise as best we can at the JavaScript level, we still find that it is not fast enough. Assembler is the answer for these inner-most loops.
The other area where assembly might be needed, is when interfacing with other technologies.
Do you want to take a stab at documenting the ABI? Even a framework for describing it, with unanswered questions, would be helpful. If you want to make a new page for it on the wiki, http:// wiki.openlaszlo.org/Flash_ABI would make sense as a page name, and the platform developers can fill in material where they know it.
I added a stub for now. If you like, please add a link to it from some other part of the Wiki, and maybe someone can give a few pointers for further investigations.
Another question concerns Flash 8.5: Given the anedoctal evidence about the improved performance of Flash 8.5, this would be an alternative solution for us in terms of performance issues.
There is a wiki-page about this where you provide some tools for starting the reverse engineering of this. Is this something you will allocate resources to? I am considering to find someone to work on it as well...
Regards, Asger Ottar Alstrup _______________________________________________ Laszlo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-dev
