V8

[hydroper]

V8 (the JavaScript engine used in Chromium, NodeJS and Deno) should be more ideal for executing JavaScript (specially TypeScript). Usually TypeScript is combined with bundling tools such as Webpack, Rollup, Parcel, Vite, Turbopack and more.

I'm thinking of translating a single untyped TypeScript bundle into AVM2 bytecode, but, besides it being possibly inefficient — not sure whether AVM2 does untyped code optimizations like property caching like V8 does — I'm not sure it'd be possible to install ANEs that way because, since it's an untyped JS bundle, things like classes are created as "constructor" functions with the prototype property assigned dynamically, and not as "AVM2 classes" (using the constant pool). The reason for that is inclusively because the class's "extends" clause is dynamic and can't be resolved ahead-of-time.

If Adobe AIR were to provide AIR developers with V8, I'm not sure how ANEs would be used, but it might work.

I'm not sure how difficult it might be to integrate V8 with the platform too... Just exploring!

About AIR HTML content...

It looks like AIR supports HTML content, but it's only for desktop devices.

• Creating your first HTML-based AIR application with the AIR SDK

And the ANE question remains.

[ajwfrost]

Hi

I had wondered a while ago about whether it would help accessibility/take-up of AIR to switch to using V8 instead of the current ActionScript virtual machine, and then to have a way for people to compile their existing ActionScript functions into JavaScript. I think though, we would be more likely to look at the idea of a TypeScript to ABC compiler (like there is currently for C++ to ABC, with the 'Crossbridge' project) since switching out the code processing would be a massive effort, and trying to have multiple engines would likely be fraught with difficulties!

Plus don't forget V8 isn't allowed on iOS devices,

The idea of an HTML-based AIR application is one I always found a little odd... but, that had been using a very old WebKit library that didn't then work on the new Apple silicon macOS platforms, so we have dropped that in favour of using the "StageWebView" component for providing HTML/JS capabilities. This just loads in whatever webview-type capability is provided by the operating system, which at least means it works across desktop and mobile devices, even though that also means that capabilities vary by platform.

Thanks for the discussion though .. I'd be interested in the background to your thoughts here i.e. why you're thinking it would be handy to have V8 provided in the AIR runtime?!

thanks

[hydroper]

I just don't like the idea of using WebAssembly or LLVM because it uses "pointers" and discards the garbage collector, so it'd be a waste of resources, I guess?

P.S.: compressing post here. Guess we should focus in TypeScript only.

[Fancy2209]

i.e. allow people to write AIR applications but using a different language (TypeScript)...

Just like OpenFL with it's support for JS ES5, JS ES6 and TS? that'd sure be interesting!

[shaucky]

No no no… I have previously some benchmark Chromium/V8, Unity/CLR, and AIR/AVM2 and found that V8 may have 10 times the execution speed of AVM2 and 2 times that of CLR. So when Andrew said they considered embedding V8 into AIR, i was so expectant!

Compiling TypeScript into ABC and then executing it by AVM2 would be a very wrong choice, I think! This is likely to result in not being able to attract TypeScript developers as scheduled, lose more than gain…

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Sorry i didn't see the date of discussion

[ajwfrost]

It's still an ongoing discussion :-)

The two options really would be to convert from TypeScript into ActionScript Byte Code (or a form of this, like CrossBridge uses) vs embedding the V8 engine itself. I don't think I'd seen the above/earlier comment about the performance aspects; the downside of embedding V8 into AIR is a 8MB+ binary size increase. Although I guess it could be most feasible to just have two different runtimes, one that supports ABC and the other that supports JavaScript... (although a lot of the application bootstrap code is written in ActionScript so all of that could be an issue!).

Plus of course I think V8 is still forbidden on iOS? Or maybe it's okay if you don't use any other HTML rendering, it does seem to be supported: https://v8.dev/docs/cross-compile-ios

Interesting ideas here..!

[shaucky]

Addition: The benchmark test I mentioned was that one day last year, I and several chat group members wrote several basically consistent logic on their respective devices on Chromium/V8, Unity/CLR, and AIR/AVM2. The conclusion drawn is roughly like this, especially in the operation of integers, where their speed is approximately 10:5:1. V8 and AVM2 still have similar efficiency in floating-point operations.