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I'm not sure that is a good example. I have no insider knowledge of Facebook so I may not be correct, but as I understand it, they switched to using their own interpreter and translate the code to C++ for production. The only remaining ties being the syntax and at least some of the API.

If the author of this article had the dependencies and resources of Facebook, building their own Flex-based environment independent of Adobe is an option they may have considered as well.

In this case, it was more cost effective to just rewrite the application in another language. Facebook found it cheaper to rewrite the environment. But the end result of breaking ties with a third party appears to be the same.