Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.adobe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 508 posts

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

#441

Post by virgilp »

vr46 wrote: post #312
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.

Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.

You're welcome! (though I only worked on a small part of it - vector/SIMD instruction support, for gaming usecases)

I think a lot of the stuff that screwed the language was that it was initially supposed to be "an evolution of javascript" (ecmascript 4? I forget), so it took a on lot of the undesirable features of JavaScript, it was never a complete break from it.

Also, Adobe made a big-ish mistake in that it didn't keep the runtime separated from the VM - a lot of the VM abstractions (like pointer tagging) leaked into the runtime, and this is why a lot of things were harder to optimize in the VM than they should've been. Fortunately, the browser vendors didn't have this problem, that's why their GC could "run circles around Flash".

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

#442

Post by marksomnian »

scrollaway wrote: post #362
slackingoff2017 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't as bad as it sounds in practice. I'm usually glad it eliminates reflection which I've rarely seen used honorably... I do miss it occasionally. Some popular typed languages, notably Java, do type erasure on objects as well. Extending that to value types feels right in a strange way, more consistent at least. One thing I'll mention to make The a better experience... The compiler, even on the strictest option…

On that note I wish tslint would stop trying to do code formatting rules. prettier nowadays does code formatting far better than tslint ever did.

I thought Prettier didn't support TypeScript, as the TS AST is completely different to the JS AST.

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

#443

Post by vr46 »

virgilp wrote: post #441
vr46 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.

You're welcome! (though I only worked on a small part of it - vector/SIMD instruction support, for gaming usecases) I think a lot of the stuff that screwed the language was that it was initially supposed to be "an evolution of javascript" (ecmascript 4? I forget), so it took a on lot of the undesirable features of JavaScript, it was never a complete break from it. Also, Adobe made a big-ish mistake in that it didn't…

Hey, hello! I know there were features that AS3 couldn't access, but other languages like Haxe could. Would you be able to elaborate more on the VM/runtime issues?

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

#444

Post by ConfucianNardin »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #52
yoodenvranx wrote: post #14

Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve them?

Aren't there standalone flash player desktop applications?

It's called Flash Player projector, available from here: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.htm...

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

#445

Post by scrollaway »

marksomnian wrote: post #442
scrollaway wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note I wish tslint would stop trying to do code formatting rules. prettier nowadays does code formatting far better than tslint ever did.

I thought Prettier didn't support TypeScript, as the TS AST is completely different to the JS AST.

It's not very different; Typescript strives to be a JS superset.

Anyhow, it does support it just fine. Even tsx/jsx (react-extended js/ts).

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

#446

Post by ConfucianNardin »

codedokode wrote: post #356
TheKarateKid wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

XP is still more popular than many Linux distributions. Should Youtube stop supporting them too?

Important difference: you will get support for most of those Linux distributions "for free" just by targeting modern web standards.

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

#447

Post by rpwverheij »

nojvek wrote: post #349
slackingoff2017 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long. Just needed to say that.

When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better. Now it can die happily.

exactly, loving the typing of AS3, typescript is what made me switch over to reimplementing everything in javascript.

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

#449

Post by geekamongus »

baby wrote: post #300

This makes me sad. The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then. I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it was easy to get into. I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into. Xiaoxiao…

Many people, myself included, bristled and groaned every time some company decided it was important to "wow" me with their Flash animation when I first visited their web page.

And then again when I clicked the "Home" link.

And then again when I revisited it a few days later to remember what their phone number was.

And then again, 6 months later, when I clicked the bookmark I had saved in an effort to remember what it was and why I saved it.

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

#450

Post by intoverflow2 »

djsumdog wrote: post #39
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…

A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable…

> A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia

Still annoyed Fireworks was killed, it was pretty much the feature set of Sketch and more with a decade of work behind it. Then they killed it and are now left scrambling to replicate Sketch not realising they already had it and lost it.

Post reply on HN