Adobe Alchemy

Alchemy is a powerful research project that enables users to compile C++ and C code that is targeted to run on AVM2, the open-source ActionScript Virtual Machine. This preview is designed to gauge community interest in the reuse of existing C and C++ libraries for web applications run on Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. With Alchemy, developers can now employ millions of lines of open-source C and C++ libraries on the Flash Platform, providing them with the power of high-performance C and C++ libraries with very little degradation on AVM2.

C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as either a SWF or SWC, which can then run on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5. Alchemy is best suited for computational-intensive use cases, including audio and video transcoding, data manipulation, XML parsing, cryptographic functions, or physics simulation. Performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0, and even up to 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code. However, Alchemy is not designed for general SWF development using C/C++.

Alchemy makes it easy to bridge between C/C++ and ActionScript 3.0 to expand the capabilities of Flash Platform applications. Moreover, generated SWCs and SWFs are ensured to not bypass pre-existing Flash Player security protections. Overall, Alchemy is an excellent tool for developers seeking to take advantage of powerful C and C++ libraries to enable high-performance web applications.