In a recent post I summarized the informations that it’s possible to find in Internet about the features that will be implemented in the next releases of Flash Player (not necessarily 11, maybe 10.x) and AIR.
At the Flash Camp Brazil, Arno Gourdol (Adobe Flash Runtime Team) has provided a lot of additional informations about what we will able to see in the near feature. Many improvements are seen in a Mobile perspective and this is obvious because mobile clients are expected to be more than desktop clients by 2013.
Take a look at the list of future improvements:
1. Faster Garbage Collection
An incremental GC will be implemented to avoid GC clusters. More control and reduced allocation cost.
2. Faster ActionScript
Typer-based optimizations and the new type “float” (32.bit) will be introduced to enhance JIT compiler performance.
3. Multi Threading
A thread worker model will be implemented to have multiple Actionscript tasks running without blocking UI and to leverage multi-core
4. Threaded video pipeline
Video decoding optimization for standard Video and StageVideo object that leverage multi-core and GPU in parallel
5. HW Renderer
Use as much as possible GPU for grafic, vector and 3D. Stage3D. Hardware compositing.
I think that especially the last point is very important for mobile if Adobe want to fill the gab between native mobile application and AIR/ Flex application. Take a look at the picture below to understand what I mean: with HW acceleration AIR 2.7 will be able improve significantly performance especially on iOS devices and even for Flex application. Let’s hope to see it very soon.
Video Encoding & Streaming Technologies 
Why no graph for Android on AIR 2.7?
Also, Flex has significant improvement from 2.6 to 2.7 but I can’t help but still realize it is pretty low compared to ActionScript [assuming that’s an AS only project]. For astonishing results, Flex being equal to AS would be killer! I’ll take anything better than < 10 though. 😦
So threading, eh? Are we talking literally having new Thread().run() type stuff? If so, that's PIMP!
Personally I don’t see how this are geared at mobile specifically. These are all the major performance bottlenecks we’ve been yelling at Adobe about for years! Finally, mobiles and Jobs made the issue that much worse and they have really stepped up their game to deliver. If this is true, this is freaking amazing!
I tried porting an existing iOS native app to iOS air app using 2.6. The performance was extremely bad..very slow propagation of events.. hopefully this should get fixed in 2.7?
It should, but for mobile app it is better to put in place optimizations
for performances. For example it is better to use callbacks than events
Hi Mohan,
AIR 2.6 was the version that brought features up to date on iOS, compared with Android. With AIR2.7 we targeted performance on iOS for Flex, and some minor feature additions.
What’s great is that now we’re all settled into a common code base, and comparable performance. In Adobe that means only one thing, more kick ass features.
Mark Doherty
Adobe
thank you Mark