Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR.

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 will bring the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web apps with minimal degradation on AVM2. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWC or SWF 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.

NOTE: 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.

Requirements:

· Perl 5.8 or greater (including Compress::Raw::Zlib.pm)
· Java 1.5 or greater
· Xcode 3.0 or greater
· Flash Player 10 or greater

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· This release of Alchemy is prerelease software and is designed for evaluation purposes only. The software contained within each download is not final; but, many portions of the technology are fully implemented and ready for you to try and discuss.