About the rest, it is always a matter of personal taste: for instance operator overloading is not as important for me as it is to you, but probably more important might be to move AS to a real strongly typed language, so they can start working on all the optimizations/features that now cannot be added because of dynamic types. +1 for generics too

About LLVM well, it is a long story and and we might continue talking about that for days … the most important thing is that Adobe should do something to improve the language. Silverlight 3.0 is approaching with many new features … and they’ll have C# 4.0 that REALLY rocks ..

Yes, I’m talking about the Gumbo one. Not sure if the improvements they did works for all the cases, but the compiler seems to have been improved.

I still do not see the problems with using the LLVM although. It seems like you are thinking about something. I mean the use of SSA in the LLVM is not a problem at all. But maybe we are talking about two completely different aspects.

So far the good news is that the MIR has been replaced with Nanojit — we just have to wait a little bit.

IMHO inlining methods is completely overrated. This is a job for the VM and works very well for Java or .NET languages since the JIT decides at runtime what to inline. But of course we need a JIT that is smart enough to do that for ActionScript.

More important than inlining is the (real) support of templates/generics like Vector. and method overloading. If I could prioritize any of those features I would go for

1) Method overloading
2) Template types
3) Operator overloading
4) More VM optimizations

C# has so many fabulous syntactical features. Working with ActionScript/Java feels like stone age when switching back.

By the way Ralph: I tried to implement your effect and I could not get up to the same speed. I it think it could be possible but that would require much more work. Anyways, it is no surprise. If everything runs in Alchemy and you do not have to thunk out: it is faster.
But if Nicolas would create a haXe version, using the Alchemy opcodes, his version would probably be faster — which would not surprise me as well.

I think the language can do both, with the right additional keywords, and perhaps some more compiler settings. Why not have lightening fast static method calls for types that don’t need ES4 cruft (is anyone doing prototype inheritance at this point in AS3), but still have more dynamic access to timelines “scripts” which really should behave like scripts in that case (and maybe not fail to execute quite as easily).

AS3 seems to be standing in a place between the dynamic convenience of Javascript, and the strict performance of C, and can’t seem to decide which way to go. I hope it goes both ways. I want the fancy new Javascript (well, ES4 like) features for when I want to script something (including an easier time checking if a property exists, and possibly even a different way to deal with errors – that doesn’t halt future code on the timeline, maybe some runtime duck typing too), and the balls out performance benefits of C when I need it (maybe even static structural typing?). Can we have it both ways – or should AS3 become C, and we’ll just use a Javascript-like language (compiled to ABC or whatever) for the timeline (with an API to access the AS3 classes)?

(that’s all stream of thought, hopefully it makes sense)