Adobe AIR 1.5 codename Cosmo
Mike Chambers Article here.
I was hoping for a long time Adobe AIR team release a new version of AIR. I was hoping especially for the memory leaks (garbage collector) in the Flash Player 9 normally fixed in Flash Player 10 and other bugs.
But I was a bit disappointed :
There is no runtime installer in the AIR 1.5 given in the last SDK Nightly build.
We still have to wait before testing and debugging 
I installed the last SDK in Flex Builder but we just able to see AS3 code improvements and we cannot export an AIR application because there is no runtime to play it.
The only way to test improvements is to build a Flex Application with that new SDK because there is a Flash Player 10 beta2 for Internet Browsers.
And I was disappointed again :
I wanted to test the famous and expected “unloadAndStop()” method of the Loader Class.
The purpose of that method is to kill all listeners and free memory of a loaded SWF inside a Flash-Flex-AIR application. … It still seems to be buggy because I cannot see memory variations when this method is called.
I hope it’s due to the beta2 version of Flash Player 10 because this bug is a real mess! The unload() method of the MovieClip class in Flash Player 8 was working so perfectly !!
Definitely, Adobe put companies in bad situation. Think one instant to the companies have been planned big projects with Flex or AIR and they are blocked now due to bugs that was not there in previous Flash Player versions…
Can we continue to wait quietly ?? It’s difficult to do…when clients are nervous.
Sakana
2008-09-30 at 4:13 pmHey Quentin,
I think unloadAndStop() just take the loaded swf and make him “available” for the garbage collector by removing every references and others stuff… But even when the content is “available” for the garbage collector we cannot force this one to remove it from memory. As Colin Moock explain on Essential AS3, Garbage collector manage the leak of memory himself… and that’s the problem.
We need a kind of method that will force the garbage collector to remove the content from memory at anytime. The actual unloadAndStop method seems to be just a “shortcut” for all the removing listeners and null variable.
And yes it’s suck because if they really do that in that way, it will not be corrected, because it’s not a bug for them…
Regards,
S.
Eugene
2008-10-21 at 3:17 pmNice article. Thanks.
Eugene
Ethan
2008-11-17 at 7:27 amAfter calling unloadAndStop(), you might also want to call System.gc() (available in AIR) to tell the Garbage Collector that now is a good time to clean up.
Note, however, that memory reclaimed by the GC does not necessarily go back to the OS. Depending on the layout of pages in memory, AIR/FP may have to keep the memory pages around. But it is then free to reuse the freed memory, next time allocations happen.
-Ethan (disclosure: Adobe AIR Team)