“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020” • Hacker News Board

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#321

Post by zackbrown » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:41 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #298

amitt wrote: post #107

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

I wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and make it into one WebAssembled language... Well okay. That's insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it would go.

Maybe not all that insane, but TypeScript is already essentially what you're describing.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#322

Post by thousande » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #73

methodover wrote: post #12

I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…

Failure is a bit strong, IMO. Flash played a role, and now it is done. Meanwhile, it was (as you say) years ahead of standards and the most ubiquitous non-standard standard on the web. In early years it let web designers expirement. Most of those expirements went badly, but many ulitmately preceded and shaped the web of the "future." Animated interactive UIs, video, audio, rounded corners.... These appeared as flash…

I guess it played a role in getting html5/css3/web-standards features up to speed

The Adobe Flex thing had lot of css3 features early. Funny to see how 'easy' it is to release specs and implementation when you are the sole owner of the tech

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#323

Post by boubiyeah » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:47 PM UTC

amitt wrote: post #107

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform.

BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and return value types; type inference was non existant, Vector was invariant, etc. Let's face it, Adobe wasn't the best at language design. Typescript is today so much better than AS3 ever was.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#324

Post by therethenthat » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:48 PM UTC

up in heaven, Steve Jobs is smiling a bit more than usual today :)

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#325

Post by jchw » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:50 PM UTC

zackbrown wrote: post #321

jchw wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and make it into one WebAssembled language... Well okay. That's insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it would go.

Maybe not all that insane, but TypeScript is already essentially what you're describing.

TypeScript is typechecked only at translation time, as is reasonable for any language you would compile to JS. (I guess Elm breaks this mold, but at some great costs.) A side-effect is that you don't have any type information at runtime, for example.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#326

Post by TheKarateKid » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #235

Without Flash live streams on Youtube cannot be played in Firefox 45 on Windows XP. So Flash is still useful. And by the way videos in Twitter and Vimeo don't work in both Chromium and Firefox on Windows XP. Because HTML5 video cross-platform compatibility is not perfect and developers have chosen not to encode videos in formats supported on this platform.

Anyone who still uses XP doesn't deserve to have compatibility. The time to move on was years ago.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#327

Post by jchw » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:56 PM UTC

wooter wrote: post #318

jchw wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we could take the best of AS3, ESNext, and TypeScript, and make it into one WebAssembled language... Well okay. That's insane. But there's a part of me that wants to know how far it would go.

Isnt JS/ES approaching this? + the native stuff

More or less yeah. But I worry it will take a pretty big change in direction before we can get something as crazy as types in the browser. To be fair, I would have never guessed browsers would be able to implement the current standards to the degree that they have.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#328

Post by tapsboy » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

Interesting, that it will still survive in browsers till 2020. Co-incidentally, today at A+E Networks, we finally migrated all our web properties to HTML5 video playback.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#329

Post by xupybd » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

Flash ads were terrible, a blight on the web. But Flex is so much more structured than any JS framework I've used. It wasn't super pretty but it did the job.

RIP a major Flex project I support :(

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#330

Post by tracker1 » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #316

tracker1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the format for Silverlight output was well documented, and open. It was a zip file with a manifest, assets and JS. The down side is they didn't get the penetration. Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd hoped that Flash would have become when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was really pushing SVG before that, and my hope was that flash content would become a zip, with assets and a manifest, where 2D assets were…

Silverlight was not open source though and it was not cross platform either. Having Silverlight/.Net and Flash/Flex/Air open sourced and competing would have been great, as a copmpany I would have made money from the IDEs and tools, why you need to keep it proprietary and then kill it.

Silverlight was available on Mac and Windows, and Moonlight was available on Linux. Again, the plugin itself didn't have to be open-sourced, the format was, which is why Moonlight worked.