A nice resource was released over on the Adobe Developer Connection. It's an ActionScript reference guide that covers Flex, Flash, and AIR.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/atp_ria_guide.html

Microsoft has officially announced their product to complete with Flash:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2114418,00.asp?kc=EWEWEMNL041607EP38A

The previous versions of Flash don't seem to like recursive functions. If you recurse more than 254 levels deep it thinks you're in an infinate loop. I don't know a way around this, but if someone does let me know. I wasn't able to test sorting a million number, but I was able to test 250 numbers.

Flash 8: 79 ms
Flash 9: 2 ms

Considerably faster then the up to 10 times faster that Adobe claims, but this is not your typical Flash application.

I was having a discussion about how Flash 9 is much faster than pervious versions. The discussion shifted to how it does it compare against Java, so I decided to create a little test to find out. I created an action script class and java class that quick sorts a million numbers. The Java version took 2.4 seconds, the Flash/Flex version took 45 seconds. I decided the comparison wasn't quite fair since I was using primitives in Java and Flash numbers are really immutable objects, so I changed the Java version to use the Integer class instead of ints. That increased the Java running time to 5.1 seconds. Of course this is pure calculation and moving data around in memory, which isn't Flash's focus, but I thought it was interesting to know. I need to recompile this in Flash 8 and see what kind of performance difference the new VM makes.