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The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

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Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#41

Post by tomovo »

austincheney wrote: post #37
kyle-rb wrote: post #35

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 replacin…

> 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.

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.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#42

Post by crescentfresh »

> 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?

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#43

Post by ChrisSD »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #27
ChrisSD wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#44

Post by egypturnash »

lkrubner wrote: post #6

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 st…

The Adobe Flash authoring environment has been rebranded as Adobe Animate now that it can output html/js/canvas content. It’s closed source of course.

Long before that, however, the fairly simple to understand Actionscript 2 was replaced by the more powerful but much more complicated Actionscript 3 and it became a lot less friendly to a new programmer.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#45

Post by gech »

tomovo wrote: post #41
austincheney wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

This will ensure every web page application can be closed source then right?

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#46

Post by kpcyrd »

austincheney wrote: post #37
kyle-rb wrote: post #35

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 replacin…

> 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.

https://github.com/koute/stdweb

There's a todomvc example app written in rust with no javascript besides the loader.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#47

Post by kpcyrd »

gech wrote: post #45
tomovo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This will ensure every web page application can be closed source then right?

Minified javascript isn't really open source either.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#48

Post by microcolonel »

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.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#49

Post by AStellersSeaCow »

crescentfresh wrote: post #42

> 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 t…

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.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#50

Post by coliveira »

ChrisSD wrote: post #43
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.
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