Okay, so I decided to give flash programming a try. Around 2000 or so, I took a look AS, I was not impressed by what I saw. Now, in 2006 I took another look and though "hey, this is pretty nice". Thus, I thought I would whip up a few fun games with it. But as I am trying to do that, my rage at macromedia/AS is growing. I have extensive programmin experience in C, C++, Java, PHP and .NET and I am saddened by the fact that the flash platform and AS is the standard in which we must write "real time" interactive content for the web. Macromedia has done a huge disservice to programmer kind by making the flash platform in a way which requires you to engade in all kinds of wierd faggotry of the "Action Script" language to make programs in it.
Discuss.
Name:
Anonymous2006-02-08 10:58
You cannot expect a scripting language to have the same functionality as compiled code, it's extremely difficult to get anywhere close to a similar level of performance. The very nature of scripting also means you don't have ther versitility of a full programming language.
Flash uses vectors which have a number of advantages: looking smooth at any resolution, very easy transformations and is more efficient than bitmaps for storage. It is extremely CPU intensive and they could use vector units in gfx cards to improve this. However the flash plugin is small, usually indescreet (unless you have problems you don't notice the engine starting), do you really want it bloated with a large amount of opengl code that won't be able to run on every system (even though most pcs can run opengl). Look at the adobe acrobat plugin to see what happens if you make plugins too complex and feature rich