With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform. Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.
Alchemy is primarily intended to be used with C/C++ libraries that have few operating system dependencies. Ideally suited for computation-intensive use cases, such as audio/video transcoding, data manipulation, XML parsing, cryptographic functions or physics simulation, performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0 and anywhere from 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code. Alchemy is not intended for general development of SWF applications using C/C++.
With Alchemy, it is easy bridge between C/C++ and ActionScript 3.0 to expand the capabilities of applications on the Flash Platform, while ensuring that the generated SWCs and SWFs cannot bypass existing Flash Player security protections.
Adobe is providing some example libraries, and developers are encouraged to share their ported libraries.
The Alchemy preview is prerelease software that is not supported by Adobe and may contain bugs. It is therefore advised that Alchemy not be used to generate code for use in production.
We are making this software available to gauge community interest in Alchemy and welcome your feedback. Please use the feedback link below to request features, make comments and report problems. Please also note that this is a research project and there is no assurance that there will be a shipping version of Alchemy.
Get the Alchemy toolkit preview
Discuss Alchemy in the Labs forums