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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

#71

Post by eikenberry »

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?

Free software has never been about the technical possibility of something, but a moral and cultural value. I.E. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. So favor sites which don't obfuscate or make their (WASM) source code available as free software.

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

#72

Post by thebouv »

avodonosov wrote: post #12

It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.

I really, really liked Flex. I built several iPad and iPhone apps with it back in the day as it was just so much more accessible than XCode and Objective-C. To this day I still say it was my favorite environment and language to build in (AS3).

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

#73

Post by seangrogg »

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?

Shouldn't it be possible to decompile from wasm to the language that was used to compile to it (or any target language that could've produced said wasm)?

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

#74

Post by Someone »

kpcyrd wrote: post #47
gech wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Minified javascript isn't really open source either.

Non-minified JavaScript with good comments documenting its behavior isn’t (necessarily) open source either.

That you can read the code (or that it doesn’t claim a license) doesn’t make code open source.

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

#75

Post by watty »

dilap wrote: post #36
desireekdlo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature. On th…

Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right. Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had c…

Was Flash on Android bad? I guess I never really noticed. I imagine it performed worse but don't those things fix themselves over time?

It's like OS X or Windows banning Electron Apps because they're horrible compared to native.

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

#76

Post by sydd »

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…

AS3 has 2 rendering modes:

CPU - this is an old API that can render vector based graphics. Every game before 2011 uses this API.

GPU - Adobe introduced a thin OpenGL wrapper around 2011. This is a completely new API and looks very similar to OpenGL.

I guess Haxe code looks much more similar to a game written in OpenGL, this they rewrote the rendering pipeline (and converted all assets from vector animations to sprite sheets.)

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

#77

Post by seangrogg »

scottmf wrote: post #51
kpcyrd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/koute/stdweb There's a todomvc example app written in rust with no javascript besides the loader.

I just glanced at that repo and what you say is not quite true. Looks like they have to reimplement the entire DOM API with JS interop: pub fn document() -> Document { unsafe { js!( return document; ).into_reference_unchecked() }.unwrap() }

Valid point - currently, wasm cannot target the DOM. I think the GP would've been more accurate in saying the logic is all performed in Rust - JS is only used for DOM access.

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

#78

Post by ralmidani »

I have zero sympathy for anyone who feels pressured to convert a Flash app these days. The writing has been on the wall for so long, and there are still at least 2 whole years before Adobe cuts off support.

Flash is the established cause of so many computer crashes, so many security exploits, and so much battery drainage. It is downright irresponsible for anyone to force users to use Flash in 2017, even if Adobe promised to maintain support for another 10 years.

Edit: removed specifics about my school and computer model to avoid distractions.

The only time I bother with Flash is when I have to for an educational purpose--that is the only situation I can imagine using Flash for a net gain. No form or amount of entertainment is worth it.

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

#80

Post by ralmidani »

avodonosov wrote: post #12

It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.

I generally do not like Steve Jobs (at least as a business person), but killing Flash was the right thing to do, regardless of whether he did it for the right reason.
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