Rick at Stanford

Rick Reitmaier ( Adobe, Tamarin JIT developer)  had given a presentation at Stanford University about the Flash Player ActionScript Virutal Machine.

This is the video link for his presentation here. I found it whilst googling.

The is one of the better presentation I have seen on AVMplus engine. He does a great job explaining the roadmap of the present VirutalMachine and what it took to get to this stage. I can say, I am pretty much clear now on what makes this present release of the VirutalMachine so important and how it makes this step, a revolutionay one for FlashPlayer as we know it.

The presentation runs for little more than an hour but is packed with valuable information and the QA brought out some interesting quirks. Personally I think its a must view for any ActionScript programmer. He talks about the JIT, Verifiers and GC during the later half of the presentation, which raised few valid questions.

One of the quirk which I thought interested me was the fact on an empty for-loop performance increase. He quickly spotted this to be a bug as it should have compiled to no code at all. I thought the same as well as I noticed this to be the case when I was testing the speed for int vs Number in my previous post.  I would have assumed empty loops would have been bypassed by the compiler. So I am not the only one who think this to be a bug!!