There's a lot to be said about the potential of the WebKit HTML/JS portion of AIR that's far less used than the Flash or Flex counterparts.
In my experience, the lack of a sane garbage collector burned me in the end. I believe the reasoning was that Flash apps were ephemeral, from page load to page load, and definitely not meant for a desktop application with a long life.
It was very hard to ever really free memory, and I remember writing a fairly straight-forward AIR app which would start at 70MB RSS, and balloon to 1GB the next morning.
In my experience, the lack of a sane garbage collector burned me in the end. I believe the reasoning was that Flash apps were ephemeral, from page load to page load, and definitely not meant for a desktop application with a long life.
It was very hard to ever really free memory, and I remember writing a fairly straight-forward AIR app which would start at 70MB RSS, and balloon to 1GB the next morning.