One of the most frequent requests for the Flash runtime has to be the ability to leverage multi-core architecture using ActionScript. Well as you can see from the video below, concurrency is coming to ActionScript.
The hour long session covers quite a lot of ground and shows code examples of the new ActionScript worker API in action. Of course, multi-threading already exists in the runtime via the many asynchronous ActionScript APIs; plus Flash’s rendering pipeline is also multi-threaded. However, this will be the first time that developers will actually be able to execute their own code on background threads. It will also be possible to render to the display list from your threads, which is quite an exciting new feature.
It’s interesting – Flash is borrowing a lot from HTML these days. I thought Adobe were the innovators? 😉
Nevertheless, quite cool, and it’ll be nice to use.
I guess it’s good that there’s alternative technologies out there that are forcing Flash forward now. I felt things had stagnated for quite a while.