As everybody knows by now, Adobe has made Alchemy – their C/C++ compiler for AVM2 (AS3-ish) SWF bytecode – available for download. We’ve seen highly visual demos, like Doom, and the old Quake 1 video where we got the first glimpse of what would become Alchemy. They’re very cool to show, and there’s some additional example libraries, but I guess Alchemy is ready for actual production uses of the technology; there’s not many such libraries shared yet.

Unfortunately I don’t have a long beard and I’ve never learned to be a proper C++ programmer, so the task of porting anything must fall on better hands. So, I’ll allow myself to post suggestions of a few libraries that I believe would make nice Alchemy ports in the hopes that someone more capable takes pity in our high-level, memory-managed struggle.

• OpenCV is the standard free library used in Computer Vision projects – this means face, gesture, and motion recognition, as well as a lot more crazy skynet-like features. It’s normally used in platforms like Processing and vvvv. Having that available for Flash projects would be a real step forward.
• Box2D is an open source 2D physics engine, largely responsible for the proliferation of physics-driven gameplay in amateur games. While we have Box2DFlashAS3 and other physics engines in Flash, having a straight port with better performance would revolutionize physics in Flash games.
• ARToolKit is a library used for augmented reality – overlaying digital images into real world images. There’s also FLARToolKit now, but as with Box2D, a straight (if adapted) port would probably be nicer in terms of features and speed.

Honestly I have no idea of the portability for these projects; all I know is that they’re based on C/C++. However, they’re straight data processing libraries (maybe except for the rendering part of ARToolKit), so I think they wouldn’t be too limited by the player’s external capabilities and would make nice libraries to have available.