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I'm sort of at a loss to this.. flash was disliked because of three things, for the most part: • Capability of ActionScript (which can harbor malware) along wi

I'm sort of at a loss to this.. flash was disliked because of three things, for the most part: • Capability of ActionScript (which can harbor malware) along with potential vulnerabilities in the interpreter itself. • Memory and CPU usage • Proprietary Does this rust variant even address all of these? Are we hoping to shim flash support into wasm-supported browsers? What good would this bring, specifically in regards to native flash's shortcomings? Not trashing the project, cause it's actually really cool, just curious why.

simcop2387 7y ago
Putting it into WASM at least will deal with a lot of the potential issues that AS could have, simply because WASM doesn't have access to the outside world to attack anything. As for RAM and CPU usage, there's not much that can likely be done. Better garbage collectors and other things like that might help but Flash itself was the cause of a lot of those problems. If this was a full implementation it'd be something open source that could run flash files/movies, so it'd be a bit less proprietary. There still wouldn't be open source editors that could handle doing it all so it wouldn't be complete or even close as an ecosystem. That said, all this could end up creating a good alternative for when all the browsers and adobe drop flash support in the next year (Firefox ESR is the only one I know of that's committed to supporting it until the end of 2020). A sane and safe migration path would be really useful for somewhere like newgrounds or archive.org to preserve internet history.
sjwright 7y ago
• Largely assumed mouse/keyboard interaction and had no plausible mechanism for responsive design • Proven track record of terrible security bugs • Was most frequently used for ads
- pjmlp 7y ago
  * It remains to be proven how WebAssembly is so much better than everything that came before it (hackers are yet to start having fun with exploits) * Flash games market was huge
  - sjwright 7y ago
    I'm not comparing Flash to WASM—I don't care about it, I don't use it, I'm suspicious of why people really want it. But at least WASM has a specification and independent implementations. Regardless, that's whataboutery. Flash Player was famously riddled with security bugs. The question is [Browser + Flash Player] vs [Browser] and the answer is obvious. Removing an entire surface area—a pure subset—is always a security win.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      All the down-voting is hilarious. Clearly there are still some people feeling quite raw about the loss of this proprietary web extension. If you think I'm wrong, please tell me about it.
      - kryptiskt 7y ago
        There is twenty years of Flash content that shouldn't be erased from history. This isn't any different from people working on emulating old systems.
        sjwright 7y ago
        I'm 100% on board for projects like Ruffle to exist for reasons of archiving history. My objection is only to people who in any way lament the death of Flash. Consider that nobody is scrambling to build a clone of the Netscape Navigator 4 parser and renderer. The fact that this project exists is testament to its importance for a brief period—but also to the awfulness of the canonical implementation.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Flash might be dead on Web, but it is still doing quite alright on desktop and mobile.
        fenomas 7y ago
        People talking fondly about flash are thinking of the way that it massively lowered the bar to creating interactive content on the web, ushering in an explosion of indie games, animations, videos, etc., the like of which the internet had never seen and may never see again. The "awfulness of its implementation" (compared to what, one wonders?) is orthogonal to what people liked about it.
- dplgk 7y ago
  Flash handled responsive layouts a decade before the term even existed.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    I think you're remembering Flash with rose tinted glasses. It's a scripted environment—you can make it do anything given enough time. Almost nobody ever did.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Isn’t that the same as responsive design in HTML then? It’s certainly not automatic.
      - sjwright 7y ago
        I didn't say anything was automatic.
    - bonestamp2 7y ago
      Adobe's Flex framework (now open source at Apache) made it possible to build a responsive layout in a few minutes... not much time needed at all (that's where the name "Flex" comes from). Some of the people who built Flex went on to build AngularJS at Google. There's nothing rose tinted about it -- Flash/Flex were definitely an important and positive influence on modern web frameworks.
pjmlp 7y ago
Outside the HN bubble, in the designers and game development community, Flash was loved. * Powerful graphical tooling, where HTML/CSS are still catching up to * Guarantee to actually have hardware acceleration, instead of CSS z-index tricks hoping for the best * It was the first to support game engines on the Web, like Unreal Unknown to many, Flash apps actually do exist on mobile, because Flash also AOT compiles to native code.
- Causality1 7y ago
  Additionally, Flash was an amazing medium for animation in the era before high speed internet. Because much of it is vector based, file sizes are very small and videos from 2003 scale perfectly onto a 4K monitor. Can't say that about any other internet videos from the pre-youtube era.
- MrEldritch 7y ago
  It was also hugely loved among amateur artists and animators, which led to the creation of most of the vast array of creative works I enjoyed as a kid. I don't think I've ever quite gotten over my resentment at the tech community for killing Flash in the name of "security".
  - vr46 7y ago
    Long-time AS programmer here. It was on its way out either way. The runtime just wasn't up to scratch and accessibility implementation was often ignored. I made my last piece of Flash work in 2011, knowing this would be the last time I worked on AS. Flex was a bust, the frameworks were all over the place, and ultimately the developers of libraries and frameworks were moving on anyway to other interesting things like iOS development. Key people just lost interest too.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Like this? https://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/ios-packaging-compiled-mode.html https://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/ios-packaging-comp...
  - 7y ago
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
>Memory and CPU usage I don't understand why people keep repeating this. This is simply not true, Flash wasn't slow at all. It took HTML5+js+canvas years to catch up with Flash performance-wise. Even after the introduction of GPU acceleration in browsers such as IE9 and Firefox 4, on typical machines of that period HTML5 was still far too slow for browser games, while Flash was usable even on Pentium III-era computers.
- viraptor 7y ago
  > I don't understand why people keep repeating this. IMO, it's because flash was not great with resources, but good enough to try advanced/creative things. Sure, canvas wasn't even a common thing at the time, when flash supported many video/graphics use cases. But that meant people thought a few effects on the website was worth including a flash animation which pegged your CPU at 100% for a while. Or auto played some FLV which killed performance for the entire website. The performance was also very platform dependent. "Linux can support 128 cores, but can't play YouTube without stuttering." was a meme, but also the truth for many users for a long time. Then Adobe pretty much abandoned the plugin support on Linux. So sure, the tech was great, and many people implemented it - maybe too many and too early.
- sjwright 7y ago
  I remember working at a major online publisher in 2006 and having to spend an entire week going through bureaucratic layer after bureaucratic layer because one of our advertisers' SWF files had a simple horizontal scrolling animation that was pegging the CPUs of our gutsy dev boxes at 100%. Obviously it was possible to code competent stuff with Flash; that kind of competence tended to be limited to few expert publishers.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    There are two sides to this: Flash was performant in the sense that it allowed you to run decent graphical games at an acceptable framerate. Flash was unperformant in the sense that it stole all of your computer resources to do it, and didn't play well with other elements on the page that needed those resources. But GP is right that when canvas started getting pushed as an alternative to Flash, you just couldn't do as much with it. I remember seeing people online talk about how Flash could finally die, and then I'd load up the demo projects that they linked to, and they'd chug at 15 fps on my computer -- a computer that was more than capable of running a 30-60fps bullet hell flash game. You have to remember that the game developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to a page, full-screen my thing, and then play it." They weren't worried about how Flash interacted with the rest of the web, they just wanted good framerates and audio controls. The web developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to my page, and suddenly everything slows down because Greg in marketing wanted to make a funny ball bounce around the side bar." They didn't care about whether canvas was hitting 60fps with hundreds of sprites, they just didn't want their webpages to freeze.
clouddrover 7y ago
> What good would this bring The project's roadmap (https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap) says: "The Flash Player has existed since 1996, and there are millions of pieces of Flash content around the web. This content represents an important piece of computing history and culture ... Ruffle's chief goal is to preserve this legacy content and keep it accessible for the future." I think that's a good goal.
snek 7y ago
Unlike flash player, this runs in the browser sandbox. It's limited to what WASM and JS can access. It's also OSS, so definitely not proprietary. I can't answer the resource usage part.

simcop2387 7y ago

Putting it into WASM at least will deal with a lot of the potential issues that AS could have, simply because WASM doesn't have access to the outside world to attack anything. As for RAM and CPU usage, there's not much that can likely be done. Better garbage collectors and other things like that might help but Flash itself was the cause of a lot of those problems. If this was a full implementation it'd be something open source that could run flash files/movies, so it'd be a bit less proprietary. There still wouldn't be open source editors that could handle doing it all so it wouldn't be complete or even close as an ecosystem. That said, all this could end up creating a good alternative for when all the browsers and adobe drop flash support in the next year (Firefox ESR is the only one I know of that's committed to supporting it until the end of 2020). A sane and safe migration path would be really useful for somewhere like newgrounds or archive.org to preserve internet history.

sjwright 7y ago

• Largely assumed mouse/keyboard interaction and had no plausible mechanism for responsive design • Proven track record of terrible security bugs • Was most frequently used for ads

pjmlp 7y ago
* It remains to be proven how WebAssembly is so much better than everything that came before it (hackers are yet to start having fun with exploits) * Flash games market was huge
- sjwright 7y ago
  I'm not comparing Flash to WASM—I don't care about it, I don't use it, I'm suspicious of why people really want it. But at least WASM has a specification and independent implementations. Regardless, that's whataboutery. Flash Player was famously riddled with security bugs. The question is [Browser + Flash Player] vs [Browser] and the answer is obvious. Removing an entire surface area—a pure subset—is always a security win.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    All the down-voting is hilarious. Clearly there are still some people feeling quite raw about the loss of this proprietary web extension. If you think I'm wrong, please tell me about it.
    - kryptiskt 7y ago
      There is twenty years of Flash content that shouldn't be erased from history. This isn't any different from people working on emulating old systems.
      - sjwright 7y ago
        I'm 100% on board for projects like Ruffle to exist for reasons of archiving history. My objection is only to people who in any way lament the death of Flash. Consider that nobody is scrambling to build a clone of the Netscape Navigator 4 parser and renderer. The fact that this project exists is testament to its importance for a brief period—but also to the awfulness of the canonical implementation.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Flash might be dead on Web, but it is still doing quite alright on desktop and mobile.
        fenomas 7y ago
        People talking fondly about flash are thinking of the way that it massively lowered the bar to creating interactive content on the web, ushering in an explosion of indie games, animations, videos, etc., the like of which the internet had never seen and may never see again. The "awfulness of its implementation" (compared to what, one wonders?) is orthogonal to what people liked about it.
dplgk 7y ago
Flash handled responsive layouts a decade before the term even existed.
- sjwright 7y ago
  I think you're remembering Flash with rose tinted glasses. It's a scripted environment—you can make it do anything given enough time. Almost nobody ever did.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Isn’t that the same as responsive design in HTML then? It’s certainly not automatic.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      I didn't say anything was automatic.
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    Adobe's Flex framework (now open source at Apache) made it possible to build a responsive layout in a few minutes... not much time needed at all (that's where the name "Flex" comes from). Some of the people who built Flex went on to build AngularJS at Google. There's nothing rose tinted about it -- Flash/Flex were definitely an important and positive influence on modern web frameworks.

pjmlp 7y ago

Outside the HN bubble, in the designers and game development community, Flash was loved. * Powerful graphical tooling, where HTML/CSS are still catching up to * Guarantee to actually have hardware acceleration, instead of CSS z-index tricks hoping for the best * It was the first to support game engines on the Web, like Unreal Unknown to many, Flash apps actually do exist on mobile, because Flash also AOT compiles to native code.

Causality1 7y ago
Additionally, Flash was an amazing medium for animation in the era before high speed internet. Because much of it is vector based, file sizes are very small and videos from 2003 scale perfectly onto a 4K monitor. Can't say that about any other internet videos from the pre-youtube era.
MrEldritch 7y ago
It was also hugely loved among amateur artists and animators, which led to the creation of most of the vast array of creative works I enjoyed as a kid. I don't think I've ever quite gotten over my resentment at the tech community for killing Flash in the name of "security".
- vr46 7y ago
  Long-time AS programmer here. It was on its way out either way. The runtime just wasn't up to scratch and accessibility implementation was often ignored. I made my last piece of Flash work in 2011, knowing this would be the last time I worked on AS. Flex was a bust, the frameworks were all over the place, and ultimately the developers of libraries and frameworks were moving on anyway to other interesting things like iOS development. Key people just lost interest too.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Like this? https://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/ios-packaging-compiled-mode.html https://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/ios-packaging-comp...
- 7y ago

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago

>Memory and CPU usage I don't understand why people keep repeating this. This is simply not true, Flash wasn't slow at all. It took HTML5+js+canvas years to catch up with Flash performance-wise. Even after the introduction of GPU acceleration in browsers such as IE9 and Firefox 4, on typical machines of that period HTML5 was still far too slow for browser games, while Flash was usable even on Pentium III-era computers.

viraptor 7y ago
> I don't understand why people keep repeating this. IMO, it's because flash was not great with resources, but good enough to try advanced/creative things. Sure, canvas wasn't even a common thing at the time, when flash supported many video/graphics use cases. But that meant people thought a few effects on the website was worth including a flash animation which pegged your CPU at 100% for a while. Or auto played some FLV which killed performance for the entire website. The performance was also very platform dependent. "Linux can support 128 cores, but can't play YouTube without stuttering." was a meme, but also the truth for many users for a long time. Then Adobe pretty much abandoned the plugin support on Linux. So sure, the tech was great, and many people implemented it - maybe too many and too early.
sjwright 7y ago
I remember working at a major online publisher in 2006 and having to spend an entire week going through bureaucratic layer after bureaucratic layer because one of our advertisers' SWF files had a simple horizontal scrolling animation that was pegging the CPUs of our gutsy dev boxes at 100%. Obviously it was possible to code competent stuff with Flash; that kind of competence tended to be limited to few expert publishers.
- danShumway 7y ago
  There are two sides to this: Flash was performant in the sense that it allowed you to run decent graphical games at an acceptable framerate. Flash was unperformant in the sense that it stole all of your computer resources to do it, and didn't play well with other elements on the page that needed those resources. But GP is right that when canvas started getting pushed as an alternative to Flash, you just couldn't do as much with it. I remember seeing people online talk about how Flash could finally die, and then I'd load up the demo projects that they linked to, and they'd chug at 15 fps on my computer -- a computer that was more than capable of running a 30-60fps bullet hell flash game. You have to remember that the game developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to a page, full-screen my thing, and then play it." They weren't worried about how Flash interacted with the rest of the web, they just wanted good framerates and audio controls. The web developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to my page, and suddenly everything slows down because Greg in marketing wanted to make a funny ball bounce around the side bar." They didn't care about whether canvas was hitting 60fps with hundreds of sprites, they just didn't want their webpages to freeze.

clouddrover 7y ago

> What good would this bring The project's roadmap (https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap) says: "The Flash Player has existed since 1996, and there are millions of pieces of Flash content around the web. This content represents an important piece of computing history and culture ... Ruffle's chief goal is to preserve this legacy content and keep it accessible for the future." I think that's a good goal.

snek 7y ago

Unlike flash player, this runs in the browser sandbox. It's limited to what WASM and JS can access. It's also OSS, so definitely not proprietary. I can't answer the resource usage part.