September 8th, 2008
Scheme in Flash questions
While attempting to procrastinate I came across a blog post entitled Sane Flash Development that mentions the possibility of using haXe as a base for creating a new Lisp that outputs Flash (among other things haXe can create).
Initially I was excited because there was someone out there having the same vision that I had when creating Ouija. Like I mentioned in my last post I’m currently working on a version of Ouija that targets AS3 and it’s going along quite well. As of now I have an almost full implementation of Scheme as well as some of the important SRFI’s and full interop with the full AS3 libraries.
The thing that I find myself questioning is that if I were to release this to the public in what form should I do it. I had imagined that I would over time build up a graphical/component DSL on top of the Scheme and Flash API, something that would allow for faster more declarative development.
So there you have it. If I decide to release the new AS3 Ouija to the world, should I give it a Scheme that can interact with the Flash API, or should I give it a brand new language that is essentially a new Lisp for creating SWF files?
Oh, and one last question, how important do you think a compiler is in this space? Initially I thought that you would need a compiler for the speed, but I find that in most of the Ouija apps that I’ve created the speed of the interpreted code is just fine, this is probably due to the fact that I’m using Ouija to glue together components that are already created in ActionScript. I’ll probably wind up creating one anyway just for something to do.