Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

Post by rkomorn » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 8:51 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #318

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.

Post by mock-possum » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 8:55 AM UTC

b33f wrote: post #304

TrueCrypt. free multi-platform open source disk encryption that suddenly disappeared in mysterious circumstances

Post by fodkodrasz » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 8:58 AM UTC

sauercrowd wrote: post #238

spooky_deep wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few commits recently. There are lots of competing MLs you can use instead: - F# (Fable) - ReasonML - OCaml (Bucklescript) - Haskell - PureScript IMO the problem with Elm was actually The Elm Architecture.

What's "the Elm architecture"?

Post by znpy » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 8:58 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #175

snovymgodym wrote: post #2

ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users. It's too bad, beca…

> ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead. MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran. Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes o…

Post by znpy » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 9:00 AM UTC

hamdingers wrote: post #124

Lerc wrote: post #26

Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was called. This was a project that should have focused on providing whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do whatever those users wanted it to do better. Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere. In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while le…

I adored my Firefox Phones. Writing apps was so easy I built myself dozens of little one-offs. Imagine if it had survived to today, its trivial html/css/js apps could be vibe coded on-device and be the ultimate personalized phone. Luckily it wasn't long after Mozilla abandoned it that PWAs were introduced and I could port the apps I cared about.