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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.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

  1. leo | September 21st, 2008 | 12:04 am

    I’ve been looking for a lisp like language that targets the flash vm and downloaded the haxe source to see if it was feasible to adapt it for that purpose.
    Since I don’t know ocaml (haxe’s language) and never built a compiler or interpreter it looks like a long journey ahead.
    Your project seems to be coming along nicely and I hope you decide to release it. If you want some help I’d be very interested in collaborating (send me an email).
    What language/platform would you use to build the compiler?

  2. miles | November 26th, 2008 | 4:19 pm

    I think it’d be reasonable to release Ouija as just an embeddable scripting language that can access the Flash API. I see it as similar to Lua, which is popular as a game and app scripting language. Even without a “graphical/component DSL,” it would still be valuable.

  3. tree | November 29th, 2008 | 9:52 pm

    i tried to create something similar - my own console based swf file that i can save and load script into which create sites. cant really get it working so would love to see how you are doing it - how it should be done.

  4. Flatlander | December 6th, 2008 | 10:23 am

    Hi, very nice little Scheme you got here! I’ve been thinking about doing something similar myself but it seems that you already have done all the hard stuff :)
    Any plans on publishing and future work? I agree with Miles with that at least for now it would work best as a scripting language.

    If you are interested in building a compiler for this (which I personally don’t find necessary, at least not yet. Most of my flash apps spend their time in the rendering part) http://github.com/aemoncannon/las3r/wikis might be of interest, it seems to be an lispy (Clojure influenced, actually) language with an incremental compiler.

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