Comments on: Multithreading in Flash update

By: s9tpepper

s9tpepper — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 04:23:56 +0000

I’m registered for that session and will definitely be attending and taking notes.

By: Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 9/8/2011 | Remote Synthesis

Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 9/8/2011 | Remote Synthesis — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:16:36 +0000

[...] Matthew Fabb posts information shared by Adobe's Arno Gourdol at Flash Camp Brazil as a multithreading in Flash update. [...]

By: mfabb

mfabb — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:28:12 +0000

Vic, not adding something to Flash because beginners or designers who don’t know how to code will misuse it, in my opinion is bad reasoning. As that’s an excuse to not add almost anything too complex that advances the Flash platform.

More likely, I imagine these type of users are simply not going to use workers, as they won’t understand it.

That said, Adobe seems to be working hard on making sure this is safe for so called “scripters” (beginner level coders). That seems to be one of the reasons for the delay, as Thibault mentions above wanting to really get it right.

By: Vic

Vic — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:00:11 +0000

WebWorker is a bad idea, the risk is that Flash will be slow.
Can you see all the people that don’t know how onFrame works misusing this.

By: mfabb

mfabb — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 03:24:58 +0000

Thanks for the feedback Thibault. It’s so awesome how available you are online and willing to answer questions and give a peak into what is coming up.

I unfortunately, won’t be able to make it to MAX. It’s a bit of an expensive trip from Toronto. I hope to go one year, but not this year. However, I will definitely be following any tweets and blog posts about session until it’s finally made online.

Also it’s great to hear that this is Concurrency 2.0 and it will continue to improve later. Still, it’s a great start and I think will be helpful for those coming from JavaScript to quickly pick up.

Thanks again!

By: Thibault Imbert

Thibault Imbert — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:50:28 +0000

Hi Matthew,

Nice article. There is definitely big interest in this feature.

Please, make sure you attend the session at Max about Concurrency, we will give a lot more details about the current design, which has changed a bit. If you cannot attend, of course the session will be recorded.

We would have loved having this in FP11/AIR 3, given that for games, it is also super useful to use with Stage3D, but we want to get the design right and it was too short to make it for FP11/AIR3.

You will also be able to inject bytecode to the ActionScript worker, you do not have to use a SWF (you will be able to) but most people may just want to inject bytecode generated by ASC or dynamically generated bytecode from as3commons for instance.

Of course tooling will make the workflow easy, so that you do not have to manually generate the ABC and link it yourself. So it will be pretty flexible.

We are also working hard for having maybe some objects you wil be able to share like BitmapData and ByteArray, which would be pretty convenient, for a lots of use cases.

Again, we decided to do this for the first phase of the Concurrency effort in Flash to solve, the UI locking issue (sometimes referred as reactive programming). Lower level access or even language support for Concurrency will come later. We want to introduce first, a safe way to leverage Concurrency which should solve most of the use cases.

After this, we will surely have a Concurrency 2.0 effort

Hope this sheds some more light!

Thibault
Product Manager | Flash Runtime | Adobe