Hey guys. When I heard about Sothink’s AS3 decompiler, and how it costs eighty bucks, someone piped up, “You know, you can make a decompiler with the stuff in Tamarin.” Which piqued my interest.
Tamarin, if you’re not aware, is Adobe’s ginormous contribution to the Mozilla Foundation, and is said to be the largest contributed block of open-source goodness apart from Netscape itself. It’s essentially some tools and classes that make up a stripped-down Flash player, which future browsers will probably use to run JavaScript 2 code (which will be based on ES4).
Now, it’s not entirely true that you can make an AS3 decompiler from Tamarin. But there’s a slew of awesomeness in it, which includes:
[LIST]
[]An ActionScript 3 virtual machine (AVMplus)
[]An AS3 compiler, practically written in AS3
[]A .abc/.SWF “dump” program, which essentially exposes compiled Flash contents’ inner instructions
[]the .as files for Object, Array, String, ByteArray, RegExp, and others (well worth a read)
[/LIST]
And on the subject of the AS3 compiler written in AS3, there’s this guy who’s experimenting with Flash programs that can compile and run .as code. This has similarities (in good ways and bad) to JavaScript’s eval() function, and may make it possible in the future for Flash programs to extend and reprogram themselves.
It’s also possible to make a web-able Flash CS3 (or a rival product) in Flash CS3, which puts into perspective Adobe’s plans to bring its software to the web.
Have any of you guys checked this stuff out? What do you think?
