During the Adobe MAX 2009 keynote a slide was shown the increase in performance and memory usage by Flash 10.1 (Mobile) compared to Flash 10. The Flash 10.1 player improvements have something to do with Flash Lite. Flash Lite has been designed for embedded systems were performance and memory footprint is a key factor. So my guess is that part of these improvements are merit of Flash Lite and the Adobe Flash Lite engineering team.
Image from Justin Mclean.
Bye the way, most developers approaching Flash for mobile still need to understand that Flash Lite will not go away anytime soon and there are millions of Flash Lite enabled mobile phones out there. The key problem is how to reach them!!!
Alessandro
Totally agree with you Alessandro.
FL is key for mobile devices and we must consider 10.x and above as a long term solution for online-mobile convergent content.
Phil
Hi Alessandro,
As it turns out a number of optimizations for Flash Player 10.1 did come from Flash Lite. The vast majority of the changes however are new and are targeted to the AS3 VM.
This new virtual machine is really quite heavy in terms of RAM usage because of the JIT compiler. With the new runtime we have a new nano-JIT, the same one that lives in Firefox that we contribute to.
We’ll certainly see further improvements over time, but for now the results are very encouraging.
Mark
Ciao Mark,
thanks for the comment, did not know about the new VM.
Alessandro