[Gnash-dev] address@hidden: [osflash] Lightspark preliminary support for Flex and the Windows platform]

[strk]

FYI.

I can't remember if we talked with Alessandro already in the past about
joining our efforts.  Alessandro, do you remember about it ?

----- Forwarded message from Alessandro Pignotti <address@hidden> -----

Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:01:54 +0100
From: Alessandro Pignotti <address@hidden>
Subject: [osflash] Lightspark preliminary support for Flex and the Windows
        platform
Reply-To: Open Source Flash Mailing List <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
X-BeenThere: address@hidden

Hi everyone,

maybe someone still remember Lightspark, my personal struggle to create an 
open source flash player. Well, although I've not been actively publishing news 
about it for several months now, work has been going on full speed ahead. As 
part of my bachelor thesis I've greatly enhanced and tested my Actionscript 
3.0 JIT engine based on LLVM. For the last week or so I've been working to 
make the Virtual Machine stable enough to run stuff based on the Flex 
framework. The test application I've been working on is mostly empty, just a 
bare mx.core.Application with a VBox children, generated using the following 
mxml source.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application  xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml";
    horizontalAlign="center" verticalAlign="middle">

        <mx:VBox x="0" y="0" width="201" height="200" 
backgroundColor="0x0080C0" 
alpha="0.8"/>
</mx:Application>

This may appear trivial, but I can assure you that a huge deal of work is done 
by the flex framework to run this.

In some days I'll release a new technical demo but, as always, code is already 
available using git from the repository

git://lightspark.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/lightspark/lightspark

I think that having the Flex framework running is a great sign that the 
Virtual Machine is stable enough to move the project from a pre-alpha to an 
alpha status. Moreover, now I think the design itself is good enough for other 
people to join the effort, as I'll never be able to finish the work all by 
myself. I'm looking for people with good C++/OpenGL programming experience. 
With this release preliminary support for Windows has been added, so people 
from both the Windows and Linux world may join.

Right now there are some major stuff to work on:
-) Write an Actionscript interpreter: since the beginning lightspark was based 
on a JIT engine to run Actionscript, as that was also the main focus of my 
thesis. But actually is very sensible to set up an interpreter to run code 
that is not used often, such as initialization code. Right now the whole 
system is pretty slow, but more than 90% of the time is spent inside LLVM Just 
in time compiler. Moreover, most of the code is compiled and then executed 
only once, which results in a waste of time and memory.
-) Optimize, and maybe redesign, the graphics rendering system. I'm not an 
OpenGL guru (although definitely not a newbie), so advices from people more 
expert than me would be pretty useful.
-) Make the Actionscript engine pass all the conformance tests included with 
the tamarin source code
-) Add support for Actionscript exceptions. That's the only major feature of 
the language still totally unsupported.

Cheers,
Alessandro Pignotti



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