David, I used Metaas, and I know that grammar file... it's well, it's wrong, and it doesn't reflect many things that happened since FP10 (Metaas project was abandoned before FP10 was released, so, no handling for vectors, for example, but not only that, it really is an oversimplification of AS3 syntax), some particular evil things like metadata haven't been handled there... neither conditional compilation was. It might sound like a 1%, but it may be a dealbreaker as well... you really never know. You must have a solid proof, not an assumption that "it will probably work".
And, yeah, you are wrong about SWC, it's just a zip archive - I used it to just save JPEGs for simpler project management. Following the series of successful personal insults... I kind of like your reaction to the language choice... sort of Homer Simpson answer, sorry :) There is no correspondence between the time the language was invented, and how wisely it was designed. COBOL and Java are examples of human stupidity propagated to the extent of absurdity... While C is a nice small language, which actually is very much consistent with itself and logical (unlike the bigger brother - C++). Go has little to do with Google, it wasn't designed by Google, it was "adopted", it was designed by Rob Pike, the author of Inferno / Plan 9. It's a language that makes a lot of sense as a language, regardless of it's compiler being in it's infancy. I feel silly having to defend Common Lisp, especially because if that was the language of choice, I'd of course write in it :) Sorry, you don't seem to know the subject in detail, really, just for the record - you can completely alter Lisp syntax to, be, for example, exactly the same as AS3, lispers don't do that, because the way Lisp is makes sense, and the way AS3 is makes little. Have you considered that your point of view may be what it is because everyone does Java these days, so I'm doing it too - why be different, if I wanted to be different, I'd buy an Apple computer? :) Have you considered that Apple used Objective-C, regardless of it being a not so popular language, and, whoa, suddenly it started to make sense? Have you considered that you might be having preoccupation because you are not very much familiar with the subject? What if if you base your decision on the preposition that if I do whatever everyone else does, then I have a tremendously high chance to end up with the worlds majority, which has been proven to be of no significant thinking abilities? (hey, that includes me too! :) After all, don't you have a soul, an actual programming soul that demands a fang-shui, a perfection at the smallest detail - a tool crafted precisely to do exactly what you need? What about the ambition of writing a better program? You cannot seriously achieve good results without these thing. Writing compiler is an art of programming, you cannot just throw in stuff and hope it'll work. You cannot proceed w/o good mathematical knowledge, because if you don't have it, the optimization will turn out to be a pain :( You should like it, no, you should breath it, to make it good... I'm saying this not because I have it, but I saw people who have, and I adore them :) What I was meaning by Unix-like approach is that compiler needs not be a single program (thus, it may be, as you call it, a framework compiler if used with the framework stuff, and non-framework otherwise, or maybe used with multiple frameworks? - who knows). So, I don't think that targeting some processor-agnostic assembly language would be a bad thing for compiler, in fact, I still think that deciding on LLVM as the compiler intermediate language is still very much plausible. It wasn't far from that in the original compiler design, albeit it got screwed along the way. ASC would be the ActionScript compiler proper and MXMLC would be a framework compiler - something to handle stuff for Flex Framework and it's _amazing_ templates :) But, in the end ASC didn't get a good front end, and all compilations went through MXMLC, which, instead of calling ASC, embedded it... (Java kind of understanding of modularity zomg!) Ideally though, I'd like it to be in the way, when there is ASC - a language compiler proper and some templating program _which does not compile anything_, simply processes the templates and calls the ASC with the output it produces. That would be truly modular! Instead of suffering SystemManager hardcoded into compiler, you would write your very own one, with whatever data added at compile time as you need, with as many frames created, mixins, preloaders - go crazy and do whatever you want, the compiler would be still able to support that! Please, I didn't really mean you are like Homer Simpson, but that only answer was very much his style, so I couldn't resist!
