as3redtamarin

The Redtamarin command-line tool.

You have Redtamarin "the project" which produce the different Redtamrin shells or redshell

And now you have redtamarin, a tool that allows to run ActionScript 3.0 on the command-line easily.

Usage

redtamarin - Run ActionScript 3.0 on the command-line.

Usage: 
-h, --help        Print this usage information.
-v, --version     Print Redtamarin version.
    --debug       Run redshell debug.
    --debugger    Run redshell debugger.

Why ?

Because we can :).

More seriously, here are the improvements

• simpler, cleaner, more user-friendly
• run faster than a Bash shell script
• remove the need to use "--"
• allow to pass arguments with spaces
• (more features to come)

What's the Difference ?

Let's say you want to execute an ABC file with the Redtamarin Debugger Shell and pass some arguments to it, you would do:
$ redshell_dd program.abc -- a b c

With redtamarin utility it is bit easier:
$ redtamarin --debugger program.abc a b c

Let's say you want to know which version of Redtamarin is installed, with the Redtamarin Debugger Shell you would do:
$ redshell_dd -Dversion

and obtain:

shell 2.1 debug-debugger build cyclone
Description: redtamarin-0.4.1.1T180-beta
features AVMSYSTEM_64BIT;AVMSYSTEM_UNALIGNED_INT_ACCESS;
AVMSYSTEM_UNALIGNED_FP_ACCESS;AVMSYSTEM_LITTLE_ENDIAN;
AVMSYSTEM_AMD64;AVMSYSTEM_MAC;AVMFEATURE_DEBUGGER;
AVMFEATURE_ALLOCATION_SAMPLER;AVMFEATURE_JIT;AVMFEATURE_COMPILEPOLICY;
AVMFEATURE_ABC_INTERP;AVMFEATURE_SELFTEST;AVMFEATURE_EVAL;
AVMFEATURE_PROTECT_JITMEM;AVMFEATURE_SHARED_GCHEAP;
AVMFEATURE_MEMORY_PROFILER;AVMFEATURE_CACHE_GQCN;AVMFEATURE_SAFEPOINTS;
AVMFEATURE_INTERRUPT_SAFEPOINT_POLL;AVMFEATURE_SWF12;AVMFEATURE_SWF13;
AVMFEATURE_SWF14;AVMFEATURE_SWF15;AVMFEATURE_SWF16;AVMFEATURE_SWF17;
AVMFEATURE_SWF18;AVMFEATURE_SWF19;AVMTWEAK_EXACT_TRACING;

a bit overcrowded don't you think?

With redtamarin utility you do:
$ redtamarin -v

and obtain:

0.4.1

it is cleaner and simpler

Details

The Redtamarin Shells are powerful tools but they have been originally made to debug the AVM2 (ActionScript Virtual Machine) and so contain a hell lot of options and even extremely advanced options.

Yoda: Scared? You will be...

This could have been solved in numerous ways, for example we were using Bash shell scripts (see an example here), but really it was not ideal as you would end up with a chain of symlink:
/usr/bin/redshell -> /usr/lib/redtamarin/bin/redshell -> /usr/lib/redtamarin/runtimes/linux/64/redshell

And then on our last update 0.4.1 we made some change which allowed us to simply reuse our own dog food to solve our own problems.

The redtamarin executable provide clearer and cleaner command-line options, but also use a native system call to launch the redshell executables:
from C.unistd.* we use execv() and so instead of redirecting a process we are directly replacing the process in-memory and are able to control how/where we are calling it, its environment variables and command-line arguments.

TODO