Been following some of the discussion around Action Script 3 on the tweetosphere. Here are three implementations of the same model from Joa Ebert (he works on a fabulous Flash product for doing music that I absolutely love).
From his Flirting with Silverlight post:
Lately a lot of discussion had the ActionScript language as its focus. People start complaining about complex language features but I think they are great because the end user will benefit from that. Yesterday evening I had my very first test with Silverlight — and I am really impressed.It took me a short amount of time to port the strange attractor to Silverlight. I agree that this is may be not a fair comparison because I know C# already but have a look at the source code. I make heavy use of type inference and the Matrix4x4 class has the plus, multiply and array-index operator overloaded. The code is more readable. And besides: it executes really fast. Faster than my heavily optimized ActionScript version. Imagine I would write var bleh = 1.0 in ActionScript. Framerate would drop to something like zero. But this is sad since there is no reason for me to write var bleh: Number = 1.0. A modern compiler should be able to figure this out. haXe can do it, C# can do it, OCaml can do it and lots of others as well.
Remember: This was my first time using Silverlight. To achieve the same result with Flash you have to be kind of an expert in strange player and language “features”. Now tell me again that the end user will not benefit.
Here are the three implementations:
Posted on 12 Aug 2009