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Comment by angelbob | Hacker News Reader

Adobe didn't "innovate" Flash -- it bought it from Macromedia, who bought another company to get it.

So apparently you have to go even farther back to find something innovative from Adobe :-)

I was one of the first people at Macromedia to talk up FutureWave SmartSketch and CelAnimator. From what I've personally seen, the innovation of the entire Flash Platform under Adobe's stewardship has surpassed even the growth under Macromedia.

You don't have to believe it. But that's what I've seen.

Not true. They made massive optimizations to the JIT compiler as well as Actionscript. It still runs faster than js (even V8) for many pixel intensive operations. Just because the original idea of multimedia was from Macromedia, doesn't mean Adobe didn't innovate on top of it.

The word innovation has lost all meaning. Improving a JIT compiler in 2005 (or later), by itself, isn't innovation, it's catching up to the state of the art.

And saying Actionscript is faster than Javascript for pixel intensive operations is fairly meaningless, because that's not really dependent on the language, it's dependent on how those pixels get pushed to the screen.

I didn't say Actionscript was faster, did I? If you took it that way, allow me to clarify: I meant to say they improved the language, and that the JIT is faster than the chrome JIT.

How is the flash vm faster than v8? It seems like v8 would have a slight advantage since their JIT doesn't produce intermediate code.

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