Gnash has recently been benefiting from some performance enhancements.
Sandro Santilli started profiling ActionScript execution and noticed some serious bottlenecks in the way Gnash handles property identifiers.
The identifiers are stored as strings in a global table and each unique string receives a unique numeric identifier. This design dates back to about 2006, but never fulfilled its promise. Indeed, it caused some serious difficulty with case-insensitive matching. Even worse, the compatibility improvements gained by handling ActionScript array indices as genuine properties put an enormous strain on the string table.
Sandro's recent improvements concentrate on reducing the number of lookups in this table, both by caching values for case-insensitive matching and removing unnecessary lookups.
Perhaps even more importantly from the Gnash developers' point of view, these improvements make future changes to identifiers much easier. In future it may be possible to drop the string table altogether, although currently we don't know if this will be better.
I can't just sit by and watch, so I rewrote Gnash's PropertyList, the container for object properties, to take advantage of the new identifier class.
These changes already make a big difference, so I've uploaded new Gnash Windows binaries. Though please note: because Flash has so many different elements, the speed improvements are only noticeable in some movies.
http://benjaminwolsey.de/bwysblog
In particolare è stato anche aggiunto il supporto per la funzione BitmapData draw() ed è in lavorazione il supporto per le seguenti funzionalità:
* Camera support.
* Microphone support.
* Further BitmapData functions such as copyPixels(), scroll(), copyChannel() etc.
Un esempio di gioco Flash che sfrutta la funzione BitmapData
Oltre a questo sono in corso diversi altri lavori in particolare il supporto alle librerie ricorsive o re-entrant
For the first time in its history and after years of redesigning large swathes of code, Gnash's core libraries are re-entrant!
Why is this interesting? Until we use it properly, it's not! But it allows Gnash to be used in more powerful and flexible ways.
Re-entrancy
So what is the excitement about? Re-entrancy here means the ability to use as many objects from Gnash's core library as you like without their interfering with each other, or even crashing.
http://benjaminwolsey.de/bwysblog
Insomma ci sono diverse cose in corso di lavorazione e per quanto riguarda il mondo Amiga è sicuramente da tenere d'occhio l'incremento delle performance il quale potrebbe rendere finalmente possibile l'uso di tutta la tecnologia Flash all'interno dei nostri browser
