by Alex Harui @ blogs.adobe.com . January 1, 2008 Every once in a while, someone decides they would like to see threading or background processing in Actionscript. While the underlying Flash Player and Operating System use threads, the execution model for Actionscript does not. For those who don’t know, ‘threading’ is essentially the ability to have the code do something in the background while the UI is doing something else. Because Actionscript is single-threaded, if you spend lots of time doing heavy computation, the UI cannot be updated while you’re doing that computation so your application appears stuck or effects don’t run smoothly. Similarly, there is no yielding or blocking in Actionscript either. If the next line of code is supposed to run, you cannot prevent the next line of code from running. That means that when you call Alert.show(), the next line of code following that runs right away. In many other runtimes, the Alert window has to be closed before the
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