Flash 9 ActionScript is fast enough to draw pretty pictures of the Mandelbrot set too fast to bother progressively rendering them to the screen. They've added so much strong typing that the language can perform right up there with Java if you're willing to use it properly.

ActionScript 3 has become the first mainstream deployment of an interpreted scripting language with optional strong typing to actually deliver on the performance dreams that have always gone along with that idea.

I'll bet the geeks involved read the Dylan Book back in 1993. The Dylan programming language is still around, although I don't see much indication of recent updates.

(The title of this post relates to the fact that ActionScript is a superset of JavaScript. You can still do all of your Flash coding in conventional JavaScript style, if you want to.)

What Flash doesn't seem to have is a true 3D modeling API. People still build their own 3D engines in ActionScript. Which really shocks me. So I wonder if I'm mistaken and there's something more provided in Flash 9.

Tags: actionscript, geek, java, javascript