In the last year, I was forced to make use of the flash environment as it was the only one with certain mature features. Before this, I had never touched it as I am not a fan of proprietary technology.
Because of the fairly advanced requirements and performance needs, I need to benchmark Flash Player on desktop environments before starting. I was shocked to discover Flash Player 10+ performed very efficiently. It was also amazingly stable. There are some programming structures, which the compiler produces inefficient byte code for, but the Flash Player interpreter was not the problem. It was also very easy to write bad code and cause instability, but I found none with properly written code.
I am no fan of Adobe, but I think they are much the same as most other software companies out there. Unless there is competition, they don't put much effort into the quality and performance of their products. In the last 2 years, Javascript performance from all vendors has had 2 orders of magnitude of performance increases. The only way this kind of performance improvement can happen is if the older versions were very poorly done.
I at least have some respect for Actionscript and Flash Player performance on the desktop. The Actionscript language is not bad as far as object oriented languages go. I find some of the ways they do things as a little strange and it takes a while to get used to. I wonder if these reports of stability and performance issues on mobile platforms are based on well written code, a result of the immaturity of the mobile version of Flash Player or based on the fact a lot of Flash programmers are not good programmers.
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