Flame Alc – on!!

Adobe recently announced the first public release of a research project code-named Alchemy. Alchemy is a C/C++ to ActionScript compiler, which opens up a huge new world for the Flash platform. Compiling some C or C++ code with Alchemy will result with a class that is basically a virtual machine, written in ActionScript and AVM2 bytecode.

Following the getting started on the Adobe Labs site Marc and I set about trying to setup Alchemy on Linux and OSX respectively. Cue much frustration and cursing! The guide given on the site is actually very straight forward and easy to follow, but (for the moment at least) following the guide will not mean you are ready to start playing with Alchemy.

Unfortunately, the symlinks in the Alchemy bin directory for ‘g++’ and ‘gcc’ ($ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc) will point to the sub-folder ‘llvm-gcc4-ubuntu-install’ in the bin directory ($ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc4-ubuntu-install/bin/llvm-gcc). This may be fine if that happens to be the version you are setting up uses this structure, if not then you could waste a lot of time trying to find out why gcc and g++ silently fail whenever they are run. These symlinks should be changed to match the sub-folder in the bin directory of Alchemy. In the case of gcc this symlink should be changed to: