Any plans to improve AS3 performance?

Lately I've been experimenting with porting my chess engine (SparkChess) from AS3 to Javascript via TypeScript.

The app has been in development for 6 years and its AS3 performance is fully optimized. All important functions were benchmarked and analysed at bytecode level, I discussed performance tips with Adobe engineers and I tested various approaches to find the fastest way.

I was quite surprised to see that the Javascript performance in Chrome is almost double than AS3. It starts slower but after a few iterations, the speed increases dramatically.

I'm not publishing numbers because it's not a 1:1 test yet, but the results so far are consistent.

Of course, Javascript has a number of disadvantages - Canvas-based UI is a kludge, script execution timeout varies across browsers and it's difficult to control (the engine needs time), support for some modern features is limited to newest browsers, code and assets are easy to steal, etc. A JS-based SparkChess would be a step backwards.

Still, I'd love to see some visible speed improvements in AS3. I know VM design is hard, I just hope there's still enough interest at Adobe in this area.