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The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
81–90 of 203 posts
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#82> 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…
This is a most useful explanation, it explains the rewrite, thank you.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#83Adobe recently confirmed the suspicion held by many in the games industry that Flash is a dying platform.
I looked at the date of publication thinking maybe this was written in 2013 or 2014, but it was not the case!
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#84Earlier 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?
You may be interested in this thread going on right now:
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has tons of of licensed code. I worked at Adobe at the time, and everyone I knew on the Flash team would have loved to open source the player.
I've never worked at/near Adobe or the Flash source, but I figured 3rd party licensing was the case.
I've always disliked this excuse. Software licenses are negotiated with third parties, not handed down from god. If Adobe really thought it would be advantageous and profitable to open source Flash, wouldn't they have gone back and renegotiated these licenses? "We'd love to do Xyz, bbbbbut licenses!" doesn't really make sense.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#86This 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.…
You're confusing the Flash player (no xtras) and Director a bit here.
No, not at all.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#87If there was ActionScript as WASM compile target, those guys would safe themselves from 1.4M LOC rewrite.
Only in the short term. In the long run its more than worth it because:
- It will be impossible to hire good AS3 experts. You will need to pay mountains of money to train juniors or hire the remaining experts. Programmers will always want to try the new shiny thing, which they cant adding more HR problems.
- Now they will need to maintain the AS3 -> new tech compiler too. New tech evolves constantly breaking your compiler.
- Current tooling will show its age quickly. The official IDE for Flash is an outdated Eclipse plugin that wont work without patches. JetBrains has an excellent plugin, but its in maintenance mode who knows when they drop it. Also profilers, debuggers,...
If you don't fight the tech dept you will end up like banks where it takes a day to make a simple money transfer because everything core is running on mainframes in COBOL.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)?
Only to roughly the same degree that it's possible to decompile x86/64 binaries to C or C++.
It depends heavily on the specific optimizations and obfuscations used, whether or not debugging information was left in, etc.
There's a reason the GPL has a "preferred form for editing" clause.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#89It 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 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…
I disagree. The early iPhones had to be memory constrained to get reasonable battery life (CPUs can be switched off, but RAM eats power even when your phone is asleep).
Supporting Flash would have resulted in a system running, effectively, multiple independent graphic subsystems, each with their own font and web cache. Users would have blamed the platform for the resulting performance problems.
Also, Steve had seen what happened to OS/2. Once it supported Windows APIs, as good as nobody wrote OS/2 applications anymore, killing the platform. With zillions of Flash games out there, the same would have happened to iOS.
Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code
#90Does 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…
You may "enjoy" this essay from a while back https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/theLittleCodersPredic...