V8 benchmark run against ActionScript in a wide amount of browsers/FlashPlayerss

Thanks for the link. Yes is it sad that many (most?) developers are only paying attention to the headline CPU benchmarks rather than the GUImark 3 benchmark which for me is much closer to real world apps.

The GUImark benchmark tests clearly show that while Flash video on current mobile devices is not quite as good as HTML5 (because of Flash's lack of support for Video Hardware acceleration - which apparently is fixed with Flash 10.3?), for Bitmap and vector rendering Flash still has a X2 performance advantage.

The situation is not quite so cut and dry, I think. AS3 was supposedly intended to be an implementation of ECMAScript 4, which was derailed by the (ECMAScript 3.1) Harmony project.

Also, I believe the Tamarin AS3 compiler used by Adobe is a collaboration with Mozilla, and both the Adobe Flash Player and Mozilla TraceMonkey engine use the same JIT compiler.

AS3 is still ECMAScript, just a newer version of it.

I do agree they're being left behind in optimization, after leading the pack for a while. Thankfully they're aware of it and they're working on it. Here's something that explains some of the optimizations they're doing to the player:

http://arno.org/arnotify/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Flash-Ca...

It's more about the multi-processor support (e.g network loading and some rendering on a separate thread) but it does talk a bit about the JITing and GC changes and whatnot.

In fairness, Adobe would do a lot better if they had the same level of compiler talent behind AS3 that V8 has. There's nothing fundamental about AS3 that makes it any harder to optimize than Javascript, and the optional static types should only help.

I think there used to be some diagrams, so the text-only version might not be the whole picture. Unfortunately that's all we can get right now.