What about Flash Player "Next"?

[IlyaG]

I saw the jump from Flash Player 12 to Flash player 13 and I thout it's "Next" time.

But I did not saw anything about it.

When Flash play "Next" beta is ariving?

[Intoxo Pox]

Sadly, all work on Flash Player Next / AS4 has been abandoned. There are no plans (at least publicly) to ever pick the work back up.

[pyrografix]

To be clear, they have changed their direction on ASNext. It's true there are no plans for AS4. They feared the changes would have been too drastic and that the community would not have moved on from AS3 as many did with AS2. Instead they chose to migrate some of the new features they had planned for AS4 to work inside AS3.

[User Unknow]

Butter improve as3/avm2 performance and you will receive new level Flash. Instead as4/avmnext

[zhang_cheng]

if adobe not care the flash, i do suggest adobe just sell it. let flash go, let us go.

[Colin Holgate]

Lots of things are going on with Flash and AIR. Some of the things supposedly planned for AS4 were not good things, so I don’t mind if that doesn’t happen. Many of the nice things planned for AS4 are going to be put into AS3.

[zhang_cheng]

yes i know that. and i don't think "AS4" is necessary now. u konw the flash position is embarrassed now. The "AS4" means hope and confidence for our develops even if "AS4" won't make progress.

[Colin Holgate]

I see that we’re chatting here in the Flash Player Beta area. My entire life for the last year or two has been doing Flash Pro apps for iOS and Android, and there’s plenty of activity there.

For web stuff things are not so promising, as far as SWF is concerned, but even there I am using Flash Pro to author HTML5 content.

So, if you’re a Flash Pro user, things look good. If you’re using other tools to make web content as SWFs, things are not quite as good.

[Josh Tynjala · Accepted solution]

As others have said, Adobe has chosen to continue improving the current Flash runtime architecture. Flash Player "Next" and ActionScript "Next", as they were known, are no longer planned.

To learn more about the latest plans, I recommend taking a look at Adobe's roadmap for the Flash runtimes. It includes an explanation of Adobe's decision regarding "Next", and there's a bit of information about the planned releases up through early 2014. I assume that this document will be updated soon to include information about further development planned for later in the year, so stayed tuned.

[ArnaudDeS]

What we NEED is a better AS3 compiler, and better AVM2 JIT.
Basically, what we need is more speed.

Flash is now getting slower than Emscripten projects on several real-word usage cases, and that sucks a lot.

[jeromiec83223024]

We're always happy to look at performance bugs and fix them where possible.  The way to get the bug prioritized and fixed is to use Scout to identify the particular code that's slow and submit a bug specific to the relevant API with a stripped down example.

Feel free to reply here or PM me with the bug number and I'll make sure that it gets looked at.

[User Unknow]

Main issue here is that we don't know if some slowdown it's bug or "as designed". Users looking on many other VM's and see that AVM need really good improvement in performance. One my friend (hacker) told me that AVM can be faster without huge re-writing. As I understand he disassembled FP because he tried to fix some old issue...

[ArnaudDeS]

We don't need AS4, what we need is AVM3.

Basing it on LLVM would make a lot of sense.

2014-07-02 23:09 GMT+02:00 Anton Azarov <forums_noreply@adobe.com>:

What about Flash Player "Next"?

created by Anton Azarov <https://forums.adobe.com/people/Anton+Azarov> in *Flash

Player Beta Channel* - View the full discussion

<https://forums.adobe.com/message/6517671#6517671>

[User Unknow]

Sure we don't need as4 Because this is waste of time. Renaming Number to Float or Double will not change AVM bytecode. All that we need - improved AVM based on LLVM. Because all current improvement it's good and cool. But from other view point it's like running on a running track. You move your legs but actually your position was not changed. This words can describe how AS3 coders live today.

[ArnaudDeS]

We can cross fingers, but I'm unsure it will happen.
Jeromie, is it something which could happen in not-too-far future or not ?
I mean, is Flash Player only going to be supported for security fixes or should we except some a better VM anytime ?

[Josh Tynjala]

According to the Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes:

Given [...] the growing importance of browser-based virtual machines, Adobe will focus its future Flash Player development on top of the existing Flash Player architecture and virtual machine, and not on a completely new virtual machine and architecture

If you're hoping to see a new VM, I'd say that it's safe to say that you will be disappointed.

As I recall, they were developing AS4 because they couldn't build a significantly better VM based on AS3. ActionScript's ECMAScript legacy requires some performance overhead that cannot be avoided. You can cite the increasing performance of JavaScript as a counter-argument, but AS3 also includes things from the abandoned ECMAScript 4 spec that modern JavaScript never needs to deal with. If I remember correctly, Adobe engineers cited support for namespaces (beyond the core public/private/protected/internal) as one feature that adds significant overhead to basically everything running in AVM2. I remember that there were a number of AS3 features that were like that. I'm afraid that I don't really remember specifics beyond that. It's been a long time.

That's not to say that the current AVM can't be improved. I imagine that there are little wins here and there, but you really shouldn't hold out hope for anything huge.