28 ms·

The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

291 points by doppp 9y ago

Xeoncross 9y ago
I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media.
- camus2 9y ago
  > I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media. i don't think most people remember how bad Javascript was, how limited web API were, and how different browsers implemented totally different flavors of JS and DOM and standards were weak. Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images. Obviously it also came with a catch: the player was proprietary and full of bugs and security holes. Ultimately, Web API progress also staled when Flash died. You still can't mesure canvas text properly in most browsers and API such as file system and WebSQL were dropped, which is a horrible mistake IMHO.
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    > Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images. Java (and RealMedia) did that first. The thing that Flash brought was good tooling for creators and not just programmers.
    - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago
      We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the ‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation), on current web design principles and tools.
      - bsimpson 9y ago
        For those that don't remember/weren't online then, Shockwave was the brand that Flash originally shipped under. It's where the "sw" in "swf" comes from. For an even more thorough history of Flash, this is a great (and relatively quick read: https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/a-nostalgic-rummage-through-the-history-of-flash--active-6733 https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/a-nostalgic-rummage-throu...
      - ChrisSD 9y ago
        Sure but my recollection is that Java was the first major plugin that really took off. Then realmedia and other players came along. It was only in the 00's that I remember Flash taking off. My memory may be faulty so I'll bow to anyone who has decent sources.
        coliveira 9y ago
        It is true that Java was the first widely available plugin, but how many people did really useful things in Java? It was always a pain, slow, difficult to use properly. Most people dreaded using Java and it only had a niche in enterprise applications. It was flash that made plugins look cool and brought innovative things like Youtube to the masses.
        jrs95 9y ago
        Only thing I ever really remember encountering that was decent was Runescape.
        9y ago
  - k__ 9y ago
    I had the impression that the Web got significantly better after it was released from the Flash lock-in.
    - nasredin 9y ago
      So instead of click-to-play Flash, now you have unstoppable, auto playing audio and video ads that spy on you...? Yes Flash with it's weekly or sometimes daily security vulnerabilities was bad, but HTML5 is not "better". It is design by giant corporations (DRM inside your CPU, inside your browser, etc.) FOR other corporations. It is not designed for people, for freedom. It is regulatory capture by Silicon Valley "techbros" of... Internet's standardizing bodies instead of government regulating agencies. Hence when I recently used the browser (designed by an advertising company BTW), websites just freely play annoying sounds. This is not "better". It's worse IMHO, since at least with Flash you had click-to-play. /Rant
      - ams6110 9y ago
        In Firefox at least, you can disable auto-play media in about:config
      - Drdrdrq 9y ago
        Agreed. But on the other hand, with web a browser can select which features it allows and which ones it ignores. With flash there was no such option. I am really hoping Mozilla gets their act together and protects us users here.
vr46 9y ago
RIP Flash but long live everything it allowed us to create and everything it inspired.
ivan_ah 9y ago
Does anyone know of tools I can use to convert simple .swf animations to html + .js? I did a thorough research and found Swiffy (discontinued by google) and Shumway (discontinued by mozilla). All the other tools seem to require original source code to be available, which we don't have... (Context: educational animations for early childhood, e.g., cool numeracy animations with sounds and colors for kids to learn to do math. There is some great content, but would have to be abandoned since Flash is no longer supported.)
- EamonnMR 9y ago
  Not to mention the Newgrounds/Albinoblacksheep/etc world. It kills me to see all of the art produced by that community become inaccessible. I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. If there's a project I can contribute to somewhere, I'm game.
  - disconnected 9y ago
    > I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. Firefox + adobe flash plugin still works (well, it works for me anyway... I'm on FF 56 still). Slap it into a container (firejail works) and you are done. No need to reinvent the wheel. If you don't want the closed source solution and the Firefox dependency, there's also gnash. Slap gnash on a container and you're set. The only niggle is that gnash is... kinda bad. It's slow and a bunch of swf files I have don't work (some don't work at all, others have weird graphical problems). If you want to contribute, gnash would be a good candidate, I guess: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html
    - jandrese 9y ago
      My experience with gnash is that it even partially works on maybe 10% of the swf files I've tried. It's basically unusable.
    - tritium 9y ago
bsiemon 9y ago
If you go to one of the referenced sites: http://www.vegasworld.com http://www.vegasworld.com. It asks you to enable flash first then will fall back to the html5 site. I wonder why that fallback is configured.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Doesn't sound that mysterious to me. By the sounds of it, Flash is still their main platform (for performance reasons perhaps), and HTML5 is provided for those who don't have Flash installed. Haxe can target both Flash and HTML5, so this doesn't contradict the article.
lkrubner 9y ago
Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming? Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got started back in 1995. Look at what happened on the Web between 2005 and 2015, where we transitioned from using HTML/CSS to instead building systems with React/Relay or Angular or Vue. Especially since 2005, it’s unclear that we gained much — the old system gave us Google Maps and Gmail and a lot of great online software, none of which seems obviously worse than the kind of software being created today. And, contrariwise, the biggest missing piece in 2005, a good Open Source tool for animation to replace Flash, is still missing now. What do we do nowadays when we want to mix images, sound and video in an interactive interface? We can build these sites with complex Javascript, though we are still missing a good authoring tool to match what Flash used to have — in particular a tool that allows people with little skill to do a great deal. Using React/Relay/GraphQL requires a tremendous amount of skill. (There also used to be the argument, put forward by folks like Phillip Greenspun, that Flash did not belong on the Web, because the Web was fundamentally about text and images and HTML. I read Greenspun’s book in 1998, and I strongly agreed with him then and for many years following, but we have to admit that debate is now long dead, along with ideas such as semantic pages. The way people use Javascript now is in the spirit that Flash was once used.) http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-has-been-undermined-by-the-hubris-and-power-grabbing-of-elite-computer-programmers http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-h...
- dkns 9y ago
  I disagree. If you're in a developer bubble you may believe that everyone is using react or angular or vue but if you're beginner you're more likely to stumble upon on something like codecademy or freecodecamp. On freecodecamp they start by teaching you some basic css/html then javascript and (!) jquery and after that you start building simple projects/sites using codepen. I think codepen is really great begginer tool. You don't have to worry about bundling stuff, what text editor you use, etc. etc.
quotemstr 9y ago
Was it really less trouble to rewrite the codebase than to enhance something like shumway and run the existing code on a modern platform? I think there's a temptation to view platforms as given, inviolate, and immutable entities, when in reality, we can and should make our own when necessary.
- Jare 9y ago
  That won't cut it for mobile
kennu 9y ago
I found the article confusing at first, because they said they discarded HTML5 as an option but in fact ended up using Haxe to generate HTML5. The explanation is that they wanted a desktop-first, multi-platform solution that is able to generate both HTML5 and iOS/Android native code. Quite interesting, as I didn't know you can use Haxe to achieve this. I still wonder if React + React Native could offer a similar platform, although it would probably not be very optimized for games.
- jchw 9y ago
  Haxe is pretty interesting. I really wish strongly that it was more polished and had a larger ecosystem, because it feels like a nice development environment and is quite nice to code in.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    I don't think it is that small ecosystem. It may be used in gaming mostly but it has a very strong success record. I also have decided upon Haxe (Godot is still in the running) for educational activities I am building) Some very strong Indie games have been made in Haxe already. EA and Zynga us it for their mobile games and OpenFL has many children web games made with Haxe. https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/
    - jay_kyburz 9y ago
      I love Godots Python like language. Its kind of disappointing to see the C# stuff take centre stage.
      - baldfat 9y ago
        It will eventually take over first position in Godot, but right now GDScript will stay the main focus. Personally I find Python (Though I really like the language) just isn't suited for gaming as well as other languages. The Indie Gaming Scene has really gravitated over to C# due to Unity. Unity also had a python like Language, Moon and it got dropped.
avodonosov 9y ago
It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.
- desireekdlo 9y ago
  I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature. On the other hand, the demise of Flash seemed obvious in the long run, with all the other standards and alternatives that were developing, and problems with the platform that never seemed to be addressed well. It seems like there's been a number of pieces out there lately eulogizing Flash, and although I understand its appeal, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the idea that its demise was unanticipated. Even if Apple hadn't disabled Flash, the same outcome probably would have occurred. It just would have happened more gradually, with a more natural transition (which is important and why I have mixed feelings about all of this).
  - dilap 9y ago
    Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right. Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had continued? (The one thing that doesn't hold up imo was the desire to not allow native apps using 3rd party intermediate APIs. Tons of apps are made that way now, and it's fine. Jobs' worry about hurting the platform because of the 3rd-parties not picking up the latest native APIs mostly hasn't come to pass, because iOS is so dominant that there's a strong competitive advantage/drive to quickly adopt new stuff. But it was probably a reasonable worry at the time.)
georgeecollins 9y ago
This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is a Doug Pearson I used to work with at Activision. He was a stand up guy. But I really can't tell if that is who wrote this. What worries me is that companies push people in the game industry to write post-mortems promoting their technology.
- edmccard 9y ago
  >This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is a Doug Pearson... In the article, the author's name at the top is actually a link to a short bio[1] which seems like it has enough information to identify him. [1]https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/ https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/
protomyth 9y ago
I think the final legacy of Flash will be the knowledge that this was the first major piece of software locked out of a platform and we lost a lot of the history of the internet with its demise. As much as Flash was a pain, I'm not sure I like the idea that it is acceptable for Apple or anyone else to keep that software off their platform. I wonder if someone comes up with the next step after the web will it even be allowed to run?
- tigershark 9y ago
  Seriously? For what reason Apple should have been forced to support in his platform something sluggish, buggy and full of extremely serious security problem? I really can't understand your rationale.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  This has always been the fundamental problem with building anything on a closed platform. This outcome was predictable, with or without Apple's machinations. But loss of internet history has happened again and again and will continue to do so for time immemorial. We lost Webshots. We lost Geocities. Timecube is gone. All of my old Yahoo accounts, groups, friends and associated content have either been lost to data breaches or outright reassigned. Photobucket is a shell of what it once was, what with their blocking hotlinks and purging old data. Anything you created in Second Life will only last as long as the parent company decides it's worth supporting their subpar VRML engine for the benefit of its dwindling community of sexual deviants. As the internet becomes more and more centralized on a handful of platforms that happily ingest our data but refuse to efficiently excrete it for archival, bringing it with them to the grave, and that will themselves one day be replaced with something more hip, all your precious memories, photos and top-tier memes will be lost to time like tears in rain. It's nobody's fault. It's the natural order of things. Old technologies and platforms die, and new ones take their place. Some data loss happens in the transition. The internet circa 2000 might have sentimental value to you and I, but it's counterproductive to insist that all web browsers need to be able to support playback of Peanut Butter Jelly Time SWFs, RealPlayer-encoded Nine Inch Nails videos, Metallica's homepage from 1997, or binaries of P.F. Chang's menus in their original form in perpetuity. Sometimes it's best to let go of sentiment for the sake of progress.
jancsika 9y ago
So why doesn't Adobe just open source flash?
- fenomas 9y ago
  It has tons of of licensed code. I worked at Adobe at the time, and everyone I knew on the Flash team would have loved to open source the player.
  - theandrewbailey 9y ago
    I've never worked at/near Adobe or the Flash source, but I figured 3rd party licensing was the case.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      I've always disliked this excuse. Software licenses are negotiated with third parties, not handed down from god. If Adobe really thought it would be advantageous and profitable to open source Flash, wouldn't they have gone back and renegotiated these licenses? "We'd love to do Xyz, bbbbbut licenses!" doesn't really make sense.
      - jandrese 9y ago
        Or release a crippled version with with the commercial dependencies stubbed out and let the community bring it back up to speed? This could even slightly advantage Adobe as they could replace their licensed solutions with open source code and avoid the support contracts.
        jancsika 9y ago
        That's a really novel idea. But I suppose it would all depend on how modular the codebase is. If there's any doubt about where Adobe's code ends and company X's code begins you'd be back to square one-- especially given that company X could easily exploit any ambiguity to scare hobbyist developers from an effort to fill in the stubs.
kyle-rb 9y ago
I feel like the author and/or the team is confused about what HTML5 actually is. They're probably right to conclude that JavaScript/HTML5 won't perform as well on lower end devices, but a few things struck me as odd. They mention Facebook switching away from HTML5, but I think Facebook is using the actual DOM, whereas their game would be using the canvas part of the HTML5 spec. Later they mention WebAssembly replacing HTML5, but what it's really replacing is JavaScript, and the actual canvas that you're rendering to will stay the same afaik. The impact on performance would probably be as they predict, but overall, their issues seem to be with JavaScript, not HTML5.
- austincheney 9y ago
  > but what it's really replacing is JavaScript That is a common misconception, but there no evidence of this. WASM replaces Flash and Flash never replaced JavaScript.
  - tomovo 9y ago
    WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers. If you already use Javascript, WASM won't be much help. But WASM lets you compile C/C++ and with a bit more effort other languages into a bytecode instead of weird looking Javascript, or its more streamlined and still weird form, asm.js.
    - gech 9y ago
      This will ensure every web page application can be closed source then right?
      - kpcyrd 9y ago
        Minified javascript isn't really open source either.
        irrational 9y ago
        No, but there are tons of prettifiers that can get minified/obfuscated JS back into a state that it can be read and reasoned about fairly easily. It's not like minifiying/obfuscating JS compiles it into byte code. It's still plain text.
crescentfresh 9y ago
> rewriting the entire codebase in ActionScript first to take full advantage of GPU acceleration, before porting it into Haxe So let me get this straight. It was already written in ActionScript. They re-wrote the ActionScript. All of it, then ported it to the Haxe language. So the purpose of the first "re-write" was... refactoring it to use GPU acceleration in ActionScript? I guess they just hadn't gotten around to that optimization in the first place and used this as an opportunity to do so. But was it strictly speaking, necessary?
- AStellersSeaCow 9y ago
  I know a guy who worked for that company. Sounds like they had no goal beyond refactoring their ActionScript as better ActionScript as recently as a couple years ago, denying the ample writing on the wall that this was a fool's errand. I assume they pivoted and turned that into a stepping-stone for their Haxe port when it finally sunk in that Flash was getting euthanized. So they might be monkeying with the timeline and cause-and-effect in the article, but the end state is ultimately what matters.
  - singmajesty 9y ago
    The company chose to move to bitmap-based animation to get better performance on mobile
- amaranth 9y ago
  I'd guess that, along with converting all of their artwork to bitmaps, this was needed because Haxe+OpenFL didn't support what they were doing before. If they were going to have to change it anyway better to make that change before the port so you don't mix up two sets of bugs.
  - milesvp 9y ago
    This makes a lot of sense. Doing a major refactoring while migrating to a new language/platform is much harder than refactoring a codebase so that it more closely mimics a line by line translation to a new language, and then doing the line by line translation. It may look like more work, especially since you are almost guaranteed to touch the same code twice, but the the cognitive load is so much lower each time, that the extra effort will make it all so much easier.
microcolonel 9y ago
This article is confusing, and sounds confused, but I feel like a lot of problems like this could be solved by Adobe open sourcing the Flash Player. If they did this, we would have a complete, correct view of how each and every feature in the Player was implemented, and a working implementation to compare to. In the sense that there is so much art locked away in SWF blobs which don't quite work with gnash or shumway. The last patent needed for MP3 decoders will, IIRC, expire at the end of this month, so we can include one of those everywhere too (essential for most SWFs). Also, it'd be nice to have access to the Shockwave player, boy oh boy, I think just about nobody has tried to reimplement that (probably due in part to XTRAs and other fun). There's still plenty of Shockwave content out there, don't know if anyone here remembers playing the Gorillaz Final Drive gamette, IIRC released to promote 19-2000, or any number of other cool things people were doing with Director.
- shove 9y ago
  You're confusing the Flash player (no xtras) and Director a bit here.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    No, not at all.
gadders 9y ago
>>Backed by a codebase of more than one million lines of ActionScript and a game suite that makes nearly $1 million in revenue per month, we knew finding the right solution was not going to be easy. That is good going.
joemanaco 9y ago
1.4M Lines of Code in a very high level language? What the hell are they doing?
- teilo 9y ago
  They wrote this codebase in Flash, meaning ActionScript, the only real option at the time they were developing these games. The effort to rewrite the entire codebase in something completely different, all while still running a profitable company, in time to beat the EOL for Flash, all while still maintaining a legacy code base, was a non-starter. Now they have a multi-platform code base, and a non-deprecated path forward. What they did is utterly rational from an ROI standpoint.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    GP wasn't talking about the rewrite, they were talking about the original codebase. In other words, how did the codebase for a couple of Flash games balloon to 1.4 million lines of code?
    - Dickie_Sticks 9y ago
      Did you try the game in question? It's much, much larger than what we think of when we hear "Flash game."
- btown 9y ago
  Thousands of self-contained flashy effects, each custom designed with its own animation code to optimize that specific dopamine response, all to keep someone playing slots and spending their money. It’s a domain well suited to fractured/“parallelized” development processes. I’m honestly surprised it’s not even more lines.
jack9 9y ago
The article is describing an event that has been covered a couple ways. It was also the basis for a presentation at the 2017 Seattle Casual Connect - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGl3pDhYC9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGl3pDhYC9o I was one of those who asked some questions at the end.
ralmidani 9y ago
I have zero sympathy for anyone who feels pressured to convert a Flash app these days. The writing has been on the wall for so long, and there are still at least 2 whole years before Adobe cuts off support. Flash is the established cause of so many computer crashes, so many security exploits, and so much battery drainage. It is downright irresponsible for anyone to force users to use Flash in 2017, even if Adobe promised to maintain support for another 10 years. Edit: removed specifics about my school and computer model to avoid distractions. The only time I bother with Flash is when I have to for an educational purpose--that is the only situation I can imagine using Flash for a net gain. No form or amount of entertainment is worth it.
- minitech 9y ago
  What do your computer model and school have to do with Flash?
  - ralmidani 9y ago
    Thank you, edited to avoid distractions.
- frogpelt 9y ago
  I don't think sympathy is what they were looking for.
- Marazan 9y ago
  The Flash runtime was not an intrinsic battery hog. The shit swfs people wrote was the problem. The same people are now writing shit HTML5 that drains just as much, if not more, battery
finchisko 9y ago
If there was ActionScript as WASM compile target, those guys would safe themselves from 1.4M LOC rewrite.
- sydd 9y ago
  Only in the short term. In the long run its more than worth it because: - It will be impossible to hire good AS3 experts. You will need to pay mountains of money to train juniors or hire the remaining experts. Programmers will always want to try the new shiny thing, which they cant adding more HR problems. - Now they will need to maintain the AS3 -> new tech compiler too. New tech evolves constantly breaking your compiler. - Current tooling will show its age quickly. The official IDE for Flash is an outdated Eclipse plugin that wont work without patches. JetBrains has an excellent plugin, but its in maintenance mode who knows when they drop it. Also profilers, debuggers,... If you don't fight the tech dept you will end up like banks where it takes a day to make a simple money transfer because everything core is running on mainframes in COBOL.
- singmajesty 9y ago
  OpenFL supports WebAssembly too, but outputting plain JavaScript (and not WASM) simply runs better and is smaller The company also has a priority on mobile, where the native targets in OpenFL are performing much better than the older Adobe AIR version.
deleted 9y ago
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darepublic 9y ago
Adobe recently confirmed the suspicion held by many in the games industry that Flash is a dying platform. I looked at the date of publication thinking maybe this was written in 2013 or 2014, but it was not the case!
- k__ 9y ago
  Yes, I thought so too. All Flash devs I knew stopped doing this years ago, because they didn't find jobs anymore.
- pier25 9y ago
  I was a hardcore Flash dev and I did my last web project with it around 2009...
- zemo 9y ago
  Flash existed in places outside of the browser even after a significant portion of the web development scene moved on from it. Building game UIs with Scaleform was very common. AutoDesk only discontinued Scaleform earlier this year.
- cerved 9y ago
  Cisco netacademy still requires flash :|
- abainbridge 9y ago
  Indeed. I think it was Apple that confirmed Flash was a dying platform when the iPhone launched in 2007 with no Flash support.
k0dede 9y ago
You should really check out egret game engine. They offer typescript which is very similar to actionscript. Link: https://www.egret.com/en/ https://www.egret.com/en/
voidr 9y ago
> Along with Javascript’s lack of strong-type safety They could have just used TypeScript or Flow. It doesn't sound like they did enough research on the HTML5 option if they haven't came across these.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  I am looking at converting 40k lines of action script right now. TypeScript is my top choice, while I like HAXE, I dont feel that is has a large enough ecosystem. Also ActionScript to TypeScript is really easy.
  - singmajesty 9y ago
    OpenFL is getting TypeScript support in the next release
based2 9y ago
https://haxe.org/blog/porting-bi-analytics-platform-from-flex-to-haxe/ https://haxe.org/blog/porting-bi-analytics-platform-from-fle... http://www.openfl.org/ http://www.openfl.org/ https://github.com/openfl https://github.com/openfl https://github.com/openfl/lime https://github.com/openfl/lime
k__ 9y ago
I had the impression it was dead for years now. I know a few freelancers who made a living doing Flash stuff and they stopped right after Apple said it wouldn't be a thing on iOS, because their project requests dropped dramatically.
jdonaldson 9y ago
As a heads up for folks interested in Haxe, the first stateside Haxe conference is set for May 3rd-5th in Seattle Washington : https://haxe.org/blog/seattle-haxe-summit-2018 https://haxe.org/blog/seattle-haxe-summit-2018
jdonaldson 9y ago
Even though the OpenFL api matches the AS3 version pretty closely, a porting job of this scale would've been a huge ordeal to go through. To have this kind of a positive trip report after the whole process is over is a great credit to Josh's work on OpenFL. (self-disclosure : member of Haxe community)
tombert 9y ago
I remember hearing about Haxe about 5 years ago, put it on my list of things to learn, and then forgot about it since I don't do web frontend anymore. This article's praise of it might be a good excuse to install it and try again.
didibus 9y ago
Haxe is also quite a nice OOP language. A kind of Java without the annoying parts.
tambre 9y ago
> The open-source nature of Haxe allowed our team to rapidly identify and fix problems [...] [like] issues with IPv6 support [...] Yet the Gamasutra domain lacks an AAAA record. :(

291 points by doppp 9y ago

I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media.

camus2 9y ago
> I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media. i don't think most people remember how bad Javascript was, how limited web API were, and how different browsers implemented totally different flavors of JS and DOM and standards were weak. Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images. Obviously it also came with a catch: the player was proprietary and full of bugs and security holes. Ultimately, Web API progress also staled when Flash died. You still can't mesure canvas text properly in most browsers and API such as file system and WebSQL were dropped, which is a horrible mistake IMHO.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  > Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images. Java (and RealMedia) did that first. The thing that Flash brought was good tooling for creators and not just programmers.
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago
    We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the ‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation), on current web design principles and tools.
    - bsimpson 9y ago
      For those that don't remember/weren't online then, Shockwave was the brand that Flash originally shipped under. It's where the "sw" in "swf" comes from. For an even more thorough history of Flash, this is a great (and relatively quick read: https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/a-nostalgic-rummage-through-the-history-of-flash--active-6733 https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/a-nostalgic-rummage-throu...
    - ChrisSD 9y ago
      Sure but my recollection is that Java was the first major plugin that really took off. Then realmedia and other players came along. It was only in the 00's that I remember Flash taking off. My memory may be faulty so I'll bow to anyone who has decent sources.
      - coliveira 9y ago
        It is true that Java was the first widely available plugin, but how many people did really useful things in Java? It was always a pain, slow, difficult to use properly. Most people dreaded using Java and it only had a niche in enterprise applications. It was flash that made plugins look cool and brought innovative things like Youtube to the masses.
        jrs95 9y ago
        Only thing I ever really remember encountering that was decent was Runescape.
      - 9y ago
- k__ 9y ago
  I had the impression that the Web got significantly better after it was released from the Flash lock-in.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    So instead of click-to-play Flash, now you have unstoppable, auto playing audio and video ads that spy on you...? Yes Flash with it's weekly or sometimes daily security vulnerabilities was bad, but HTML5 is not "better". It is design by giant corporations (DRM inside your CPU, inside your browser, etc.) FOR other corporations. It is not designed for people, for freedom. It is regulatory capture by Silicon Valley "techbros" of... Internet's standardizing bodies instead of government regulating agencies. Hence when I recently used the browser (designed by an advertising company BTW), websites just freely play annoying sounds. This is not "better". It's worse IMHO, since at least with Flash you had click-to-play. /Rant
    - ams6110 9y ago
      In Firefox at least, you can disable auto-play media in about:config
    - Drdrdrq 9y ago
      Agreed. But on the other hand, with web a browser can select which features it allows and which ones it ignores. With flash there was no such option. I am really hoping Mozilla gets their act together and protects us users here.

vr46 9y ago

RIP Flash but long live everything it allowed us to create and everything it inspired.

ivan_ah 9y ago

Does anyone know of tools I can use to convert simple .swf animations to html + .js? I did a thorough research and found Swiffy (discontinued by google) and Shumway (discontinued by mozilla). All the other tools seem to require original source code to be available, which we don't have... (Context: educational animations for early childhood, e.g., cool numeracy animations with sounds and colors for kids to learn to do math. There is some great content, but would have to be abandoned since Flash is no longer supported.)

EamonnMR 9y ago
Not to mention the Newgrounds/Albinoblacksheep/etc world. It kills me to see all of the art produced by that community become inaccessible. I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. If there's a project I can contribute to somewhere, I'm game.
- disconnected 9y ago
  > I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. Firefox + adobe flash plugin still works (well, it works for me anyway... I'm on FF 56 still). Slap it into a container (firejail works) and you are done. No need to reinvent the wheel. If you don't want the closed source solution and the Firefox dependency, there's also gnash. Slap gnash on a container and you're set. The only niggle is that gnash is... kinda bad. It's slow and a bunch of swf files I have don't work (some don't work at all, others have weird graphical problems). If you want to contribute, gnash would be a good candidate, I guess: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/index.html
  - jandrese 9y ago
    My experience with gnash is that it even partially works on maybe 10% of the swf files I've tried. It's basically unusable.
  - tritium 9y ago

bsiemon 9y ago

If you go to one of the referenced sites: http://www.vegasworld.com http://www.vegasworld.com. It asks you to enable flash first then will fall back to the html5 site. I wonder why that fallback is configured.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
Doesn't sound that mysterious to me. By the sounds of it, Flash is still their main platform (for performance reasons perhaps), and HTML5 is provided for those who don't have Flash installed. Haxe can target both Flash and HTML5, so this doesn't contradict the article.

lkrubner 9y ago

Does anyone else have the feeling that there has been a move away from the kinds of tools that make it very easy for beginners to get started? I'm thinking of things like Hypercard, Flash or VisualBasic classic (VisualBasic in the 1990s). Simple tools that made it fun for non-programmers to learn the basics of computer programming? Even simple HTML/CSS has lost importance, and writing simple Web sites is how I got started back in 1995. Look at what happened on the Web between 2005 and 2015, where we transitioned from using HTML/CSS to instead building systems with React/Relay or Angular or Vue. Especially since 2005, it’s unclear that we gained much — the old system gave us Google Maps and Gmail and a lot of great online software, none of which seems obviously worse than the kind of software being created today. And, contrariwise, the biggest missing piece in 2005, a good Open Source tool for animation to replace Flash, is still missing now. What do we do nowadays when we want to mix images, sound and video in an interactive interface? We can build these sites with complex Javascript, though we are still missing a good authoring tool to match what Flash used to have — in particular a tool that allows people with little skill to do a great deal. Using React/Relay/GraphQL requires a tremendous amount of skill. (There also used to be the argument, put forward by folks like Phillip Greenspun, that Flash did not belong on the Web, because the Web was fundamentally about text and images and HTML. I read Greenspun’s book in 1998, and I strongly agreed with him then and for many years following, but we have to admit that debate is now long dead, along with ideas such as semantic pages. The way people use Javascript now is in the spirit that Flash was once used.) http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-has-been-undermined-by-the-hubris-and-power-grabbing-of-elite-computer-programmers http://www.smashcompany.com/business/business-productivity-h...

dkns 9y ago
I disagree. If you're in a developer bubble you may believe that everyone is using react or angular or vue but if you're beginner you're more likely to stumble upon on something like codecademy or freecodecamp. On freecodecamp they start by teaching you some basic css/html then javascript and (!) jquery and after that you start building simple projects/sites using codepen. I think codepen is really great begginer tool. You don't have to worry about bundling stuff, what text editor you use, etc. etc.

quotemstr 9y ago

Was it really less trouble to rewrite the codebase than to enhance something like shumway and run the existing code on a modern platform? I think there's a temptation to view platforms as given, inviolate, and immutable entities, when in reality, we can and should make our own when necessary.

Jare 9y ago
That won't cut it for mobile

kennu 9y ago

I found the article confusing at first, because they said they discarded HTML5 as an option but in fact ended up using Haxe to generate HTML5. The explanation is that they wanted a desktop-first, multi-platform solution that is able to generate both HTML5 and iOS/Android native code. Quite interesting, as I didn't know you can use Haxe to achieve this. I still wonder if React + React Native could offer a similar platform, although it would probably not be very optimized for games.

jchw 9y ago
Haxe is pretty interesting. I really wish strongly that it was more polished and had a larger ecosystem, because it feels like a nice development environment and is quite nice to code in.
- baldfat 9y ago
  I don't think it is that small ecosystem. It may be used in gaming mostly but it has a very strong success record. I also have decided upon Haxe (Godot is still in the running) for educational activities I am building) Some very strong Indie games have been made in Haxe already. EA and Zynga us it for their mobile games and OpenFL has many children web games made with Haxe. https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/
  - jay_kyburz 9y ago
    I love Godots Python like language. Its kind of disappointing to see the C# stuff take centre stage.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      It will eventually take over first position in Godot, but right now GDScript will stay the main focus. Personally I find Python (Though I really like the language) just isn't suited for gaming as well as other languages. The Indie Gaming Scene has really gravitated over to C# due to Unity. Unity also had a python like Language, Moon and it got dropped.

avodonosov 9y ago

It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.

desireekdlo 9y ago
I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature. On the other hand, the demise of Flash seemed obvious in the long run, with all the other standards and alternatives that were developing, and problems with the platform that never seemed to be addressed well. It seems like there's been a number of pieces out there lately eulogizing Flash, and although I understand its appeal, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the idea that its demise was unanticipated. Even if Apple hadn't disabled Flash, the same outcome probably would have occurred. It just would have happened more gradually, with a more natural transition (which is important and why I have mixed feelings about all of this).
- dilap 9y ago
  Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right. Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had continued? (The one thing that doesn't hold up imo was the desire to not allow native apps using 3rd party intermediate APIs. Tons of apps are made that way now, and it's fine. Jobs' worry about hurting the platform because of the 3rd-parties not picking up the latest native APIs mostly hasn't come to pass, because iOS is so dominant that there's a strong competitive advantage/drive to quickly adopt new stuff. But it was probably a reasonable worry at the time.)

georgeecollins 9y ago

This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is a Doug Pearson I used to work with at Activision. He was a stand up guy. But I really can't tell if that is who wrote this. What worries me is that companies push people in the game industry to write post-mortems promoting their technology.

edmccard 9y ago
>This article bugs me because they don't clearly identify the author. There is a Doug Pearson... In the article, the author's name at the top is actually a link to a short bio[1] which seems like it has enough information to identify him. [1]https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/ https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DougPearson/1021383/

protomyth 9y ago

I think the final legacy of Flash will be the knowledge that this was the first major piece of software locked out of a platform and we lost a lot of the history of the internet with its demise. As much as Flash was a pain, I'm not sure I like the idea that it is acceptable for Apple or anyone else to keep that software off their platform. I wonder if someone comes up with the next step after the web will it even be allowed to run?

tigershark 9y ago
Seriously? For what reason Apple should have been forced to support in his platform something sluggish, buggy and full of extremely serious security problem? I really can't understand your rationale.
jstarfish 9y ago
This has always been the fundamental problem with building anything on a closed platform. This outcome was predictable, with or without Apple's machinations. But loss of internet history has happened again and again and will continue to do so for time immemorial. We lost Webshots. We lost Geocities. Timecube is gone. All of my old Yahoo accounts, groups, friends and associated content have either been lost to data breaches or outright reassigned. Photobucket is a shell of what it once was, what with their blocking hotlinks and purging old data. Anything you created in Second Life will only last as long as the parent company decides it's worth supporting their subpar VRML engine for the benefit of its dwindling community of sexual deviants. As the internet becomes more and more centralized on a handful of platforms that happily ingest our data but refuse to efficiently excrete it for archival, bringing it with them to the grave, and that will themselves one day be replaced with something more hip, all your precious memories, photos and top-tier memes will be lost to time like tears in rain. It's nobody's fault. It's the natural order of things. Old technologies and platforms die, and new ones take their place. Some data loss happens in the transition. The internet circa 2000 might have sentimental value to you and I, but it's counterproductive to insist that all web browsers need to be able to support playback of Peanut Butter Jelly Time SWFs, RealPlayer-encoded Nine Inch Nails videos, Metallica's homepage from 1997, or binaries of P.F. Chang's menus in their original form in perpetuity. Sometimes it's best to let go of sentiment for the sake of progress.

jancsika 9y ago

So why doesn't Adobe just open source flash?

fenomas 9y ago
It has tons of of licensed code. I worked at Adobe at the time, and everyone I knew on the Flash team would have loved to open source the player.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  I've never worked at/near Adobe or the Flash source, but I figured 3rd party licensing was the case.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    I've always disliked this excuse. Software licenses are negotiated with third parties, not handed down from god. If Adobe really thought it would be advantageous and profitable to open source Flash, wouldn't they have gone back and renegotiated these licenses? "We'd love to do Xyz, bbbbbut licenses!" doesn't really make sense.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      Or release a crippled version with with the commercial dependencies stubbed out and let the community bring it back up to speed? This could even slightly advantage Adobe as they could replace their licensed solutions with open source code and avoid the support contracts.
      - jancsika 9y ago
        That's a really novel idea. But I suppose it would all depend on how modular the codebase is. If there's any doubt about where Adobe's code ends and company X's code begins you'd be back to square one-- especially given that company X could easily exploit any ambiguity to scare hobbyist developers from an effort to fill in the stubs.

kyle-rb 9y ago

I feel like the author and/or the team is confused about what HTML5 actually is. They're probably right to conclude that JavaScript/HTML5 won't perform as well on lower end devices, but a few things struck me as odd. They mention Facebook switching away from HTML5, but I think Facebook is using the actual DOM, whereas their game would be using the canvas part of the HTML5 spec. Later they mention WebAssembly replacing HTML5, but what it's really replacing is JavaScript, and the actual canvas that you're rendering to will stay the same afaik. The impact on performance would probably be as they predict, but overall, their issues seem to be with JavaScript, not HTML5.

austincheney 9y ago
> but what it's really replacing is JavaScript That is a common misconception, but there no evidence of this. WASM replaces Flash and Flash never replaced JavaScript.
- tomovo 9y ago
  WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers. If you already use Javascript, WASM won't be much help. But WASM lets you compile C/C++ and with a bit more effort other languages into a bytecode instead of weird looking Javascript, or its more streamlined and still weird form, asm.js.
  - gech 9y ago
    This will ensure every web page application can be closed source then right?
    - kpcyrd 9y ago
      Minified javascript isn't really open source either.
      - irrational 9y ago
        No, but there are tons of prettifiers that can get minified/obfuscated JS back into a state that it can be read and reasoned about fairly easily. It's not like minifiying/obfuscating JS compiles it into byte code. It's still plain text.

crescentfresh 9y ago

> rewriting the entire codebase in ActionScript first to take full advantage of GPU acceleration, before porting it into Haxe So let me get this straight. It was already written in ActionScript. They re-wrote the ActionScript. All of it, then ported it to the Haxe language. So the purpose of the first "re-write" was... refactoring it to use GPU acceleration in ActionScript? I guess they just hadn't gotten around to that optimization in the first place and used this as an opportunity to do so. But was it strictly speaking, necessary?

AStellersSeaCow 9y ago
I know a guy who worked for that company. Sounds like they had no goal beyond refactoring their ActionScript as better ActionScript as recently as a couple years ago, denying the ample writing on the wall that this was a fool's errand. I assume they pivoted and turned that into a stepping-stone for their Haxe port when it finally sunk in that Flash was getting euthanized. So they might be monkeying with the timeline and cause-and-effect in the article, but the end state is ultimately what matters.
- singmajesty 9y ago
  The company chose to move to bitmap-based animation to get better performance on mobile
amaranth 9y ago
I'd guess that, along with converting all of their artwork to bitmaps, this was needed because Haxe+OpenFL didn't support what they were doing before. If they were going to have to change it anyway better to make that change before the port so you don't mix up two sets of bugs.
- milesvp 9y ago
  This makes a lot of sense. Doing a major refactoring while migrating to a new language/platform is much harder than refactoring a codebase so that it more closely mimics a line by line translation to a new language, and then doing the line by line translation. It may look like more work, especially since you are almost guaranteed to touch the same code twice, but the the cognitive load is so much lower each time, that the extra effort will make it all so much easier.

microcolonel 9y ago

This article is confusing, and sounds confused, but I feel like a lot of problems like this could be solved by Adobe open sourcing the Flash Player. If they did this, we would have a complete, correct view of how each and every feature in the Player was implemented, and a working implementation to compare to. In the sense that there is so much art locked away in SWF blobs which don't quite work with gnash or shumway. The last patent needed for MP3 decoders will, IIRC, expire at the end of this month, so we can include one of those everywhere too (essential for most SWFs). Also, it'd be nice to have access to the Shockwave player, boy oh boy, I think just about nobody has tried to reimplement that (probably due in part to XTRAs and other fun). There's still plenty of Shockwave content out there, don't know if anyone here remembers playing the Gorillaz Final Drive gamette, IIRC released to promote 19-2000, or any number of other cool things people were doing with Director.

shove 9y ago
You're confusing the Flash player (no xtras) and Director a bit here.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  No, not at all.

gadders 9y ago

>>Backed by a codebase of more than one million lines of ActionScript and a game suite that makes nearly $1 million in revenue per month, we knew finding the right solution was not going to be easy. That is good going.

joemanaco 9y ago

1.4M Lines of Code in a very high level language? What the hell are they doing?

teilo 9y ago
They wrote this codebase in Flash, meaning ActionScript, the only real option at the time they were developing these games. The effort to rewrite the entire codebase in something completely different, all while still running a profitable company, in time to beat the EOL for Flash, all while still maintaining a legacy code base, was a non-starter. Now they have a multi-platform code base, and a non-deprecated path forward. What they did is utterly rational from an ROI standpoint.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  GP wasn't talking about the rewrite, they were talking about the original codebase. In other words, how did the codebase for a couple of Flash games balloon to 1.4 million lines of code?
  - Dickie_Sticks 9y ago
    Did you try the game in question? It's much, much larger than what we think of when we hear "Flash game."
btown 9y ago
Thousands of self-contained flashy effects, each custom designed with its own animation code to optimize that specific dopamine response, all to keep someone playing slots and spending their money. It’s a domain well suited to fractured/“parallelized” development processes. I’m honestly surprised it’s not even more lines.

jack9 9y ago

The article is describing an event that has been covered a couple ways. It was also the basis for a presentation at the 2017 Seattle Casual Connect - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGl3pDhYC9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGl3pDhYC9o I was one of those who asked some questions at the end.

ralmidani 9y ago

I have zero sympathy for anyone who feels pressured to convert a Flash app these days. The writing has been on the wall for so long, and there are still at least 2 whole years before Adobe cuts off support. Flash is the established cause of so many computer crashes, so many security exploits, and so much battery drainage. It is downright irresponsible for anyone to force users to use Flash in 2017, even if Adobe promised to maintain support for another 10 years. Edit: removed specifics about my school and computer model to avoid distractions. The only time I bother with Flash is when I have to for an educational purpose--that is the only situation I can imagine using Flash for a net gain. No form or amount of entertainment is worth it.

minitech 9y ago
What do your computer model and school have to do with Flash?
- ralmidani 9y ago
  Thank you, edited to avoid distractions.
frogpelt 9y ago
I don't think sympathy is what they were looking for.
Marazan 9y ago
The Flash runtime was not an intrinsic battery hog. The shit swfs people wrote was the problem. The same people are now writing shit HTML5 that drains just as much, if not more, battery

finchisko 9y ago

If there was ActionScript as WASM compile target, those guys would safe themselves from 1.4M LOC rewrite.

sydd 9y ago
Only in the short term. In the long run its more than worth it because: - It will be impossible to hire good AS3 experts. You will need to pay mountains of money to train juniors or hire the remaining experts. Programmers will always want to try the new shiny thing, which they cant adding more HR problems. - Now they will need to maintain the AS3 -> new tech compiler too. New tech evolves constantly breaking your compiler. - Current tooling will show its age quickly. The official IDE for Flash is an outdated Eclipse plugin that wont work without patches. JetBrains has an excellent plugin, but its in maintenance mode who knows when they drop it. Also profilers, debuggers,... If you don't fight the tech dept you will end up like banks where it takes a day to make a simple money transfer because everything core is running on mainframes in COBOL.
singmajesty 9y ago
OpenFL supports WebAssembly too, but outputting plain JavaScript (and not WASM) simply runs better and is smaller The company also has a priority on mobile, where the native targets in OpenFL are performing much better than the older Adobe AIR version.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

darepublic 9y ago

Adobe recently confirmed the suspicion held by many in the games industry that Flash is a dying platform. I looked at the date of publication thinking maybe this was written in 2013 or 2014, but it was not the case!

k__ 9y ago
Yes, I thought so too. All Flash devs I knew stopped doing this years ago, because they didn't find jobs anymore.
pier25 9y ago
I was a hardcore Flash dev and I did my last web project with it around 2009...
zemo 9y ago
Flash existed in places outside of the browser even after a significant portion of the web development scene moved on from it. Building game UIs with Scaleform was very common. AutoDesk only discontinued Scaleform earlier this year.
cerved 9y ago
Cisco netacademy still requires flash :|
abainbridge 9y ago
Indeed. I think it was Apple that confirmed Flash was a dying platform when the iPhone launched in 2007 with no Flash support.

k0dede 9y ago

You should really check out egret game engine. They offer typescript which is very similar to actionscript. Link: https://www.egret.com/en/ https://www.egret.com/en/

voidr 9y ago

> Along with Javascript’s lack of strong-type safety They could have just used TypeScript or Flow. It doesn't sound like they did enough research on the HTML5 option if they haven't came across these.

BatFastard 9y ago
I am looking at converting 40k lines of action script right now. TypeScript is my top choice, while I like HAXE, I dont feel that is has a large enough ecosystem. Also ActionScript to TypeScript is really easy.
- singmajesty 9y ago
  OpenFL is getting TypeScript support in the next release

based2 9y ago

https://haxe.org/blog/porting-bi-analytics-platform-from-flex-to-haxe/ https://haxe.org/blog/porting-bi-analytics-platform-from-fle... http://www.openfl.org/ http://www.openfl.org/ https://github.com/openfl https://github.com/openfl https://github.com/openfl/lime https://github.com/openfl/lime

k__ 9y ago

I had the impression it was dead for years now. I know a few freelancers who made a living doing Flash stuff and they stopped right after Apple said it wouldn't be a thing on iOS, because their project requests dropped dramatically.

jdonaldson 9y ago

As a heads up for folks interested in Haxe, the first stateside Haxe conference is set for May 3rd-5th in Seattle Washington : https://haxe.org/blog/seattle-haxe-summit-2018 https://haxe.org/blog/seattle-haxe-summit-2018

jdonaldson 9y ago

Even though the OpenFL api matches the AS3 version pretty closely, a porting job of this scale would've been a huge ordeal to go through. To have this kind of a positive trip report after the whole process is over is a great credit to Josh's work on OpenFL. (self-disclosure : member of Haxe community)

tombert 9y ago

I remember hearing about Haxe about 5 years ago, put it on my list of things to learn, and then forgot about it since I don't do web frontend anymore. This article's praise of it might be a good excuse to install it and try again.

didibus 9y ago

Haxe is also quite a nice OOP language. A kind of Java without the annoying parts.

tambre 9y ago

> The open-source nature of Haxe allowed our team to rapidly identify and fix problems [...] [like] issues with IPv6 support [...] Yet the Gamasutra domain lacks an AAAA record. :(