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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

#161

Post by austincheney »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #160
austincheney wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers. Ugggh, still no evidence. WASM is a compile target in a sandbox. It is the new Flash or Java applet. Everything else is a wish list from people incredibly insecure about touching JavaScript. So far any advocation that WASM will magically replace JavaScript severely misunderstands both WASM and JavaScript. I will continue to await something more tha…

Nobody was claiming that WASM would replace JavaScript in general, magically or otherwise. I think there's reason to believe it will replace asm.js since it's already being integrated into Emscripten and the major browsers have already landed support in their stable releases. I find comparing it to Flash or Java applets weird, given the fact that you clearly understand that it doesn't interact with the outside world…

> Nobody was claiming that WASM would replace JavaScript in general, magically or otherwise.

That is literally what I have heard directly on here and Reddit numerous times.

> Unless you consider people who using things like Node.js or Electron to be "insecure about touching C/C++" I don't see where you get off saying that about people who want to use WASM.

I am not saying that about WASM. I am saying that about the people who obsessively NEED for WASM to replace JavaScript and believe this to be a magically solution.

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

#163

Post by jancsika »

jandrese wrote: post #96
ryandrake wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or release a crippled version with with the commercial dependencies stubbed out and let the community bring it back up to speed? This could even slightly advantage Adobe as they could replace their licensed solutions with open source code and avoid the support contracts.

That's a really novel idea. But I suppose it would all depend on how modular the codebase is. If there's any doubt about where Adobe's code ends and company X's code begins you'd be back to square one-- especially given that company X could easily exploit any ambiguity to scare hobbyist developers from an effort to fill in the stubs.

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

#164

Post by jancsika »

fenomas wrote: post #33
jancsika wrote: post #28

So why doesn't Adobe just open source flash?

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.

Would it be a license violation to release specs or design docs for Flash?

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

#165

Post by pier25 »

darepublic wrote: post #83

Adobe 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!

I was a hardcore Flash dev and I did my last web project with it around 2009...

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

#166

Post by Dickie_Sticks »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #120
teilo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wrote this codebase in Flash, meaning ActionScript, the only real option at the time they were developing these games. The effort to rewrite the entire codebase in something completely different, all while still running a profitable company, in time to beat the EOL for Flash, all while still maintaining a legacy code base, was a non-starter. Now they have a multi-platform code base, and a non-deprecated path for…

GP wasn't talking about the rewrite, they were talking about the original codebase. In other words, how did the codebase for a couple of Flash games balloon to 1.4 million lines of code?

Did you try the game in question? It's much, much larger than what we think of when we hear "Flash game."

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

#167

Post by pier25 »

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 was a Flash dev for a decade and I'm not sure I agree with you.

On one hand AS3 was a much better language 10 years ago than JS is today.

But OTOH when I was doing UIs in Flash I always missed HTML and CSS.

The good thing about Flash is that you could make stuff that was impossible otherwise, but once HTML5 was here why chose Flash? It was slow and a battery hog.

Steve Jobs didn't kill Flash, it died under its own weight or probably Adobe let it die. Maybe Adobe thought investing in AS4 didn't make sense considering everyone was moving to HTML5.

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

#168

Post by singmajesty »

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…

Facebook famously moved away from HTML5 for mobile applications, the author is talking about a time some years ago when his company began to look for other technology.

I think the important thing here is that "HTML5" as a solution would mean wrapping it in a Phonegap/Cordova application for mobile. Haxe means HTML5 and/or Flash on the web, but also native for mobile.

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

#169

Post by singmajesty »

AStellersSeaCow wrote: post #49
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…

The company chose to move to bitmap-based animation to get better performance on mobile

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

#170

Post by singmajesty »

finchisko wrote: post #79

If there was ActionScript as WASM compile target, those guys would safe themselves from 1.4M LOC rewrite.

OpenFL supports WebAssembly too, but outputting plain JavaScript (and not WASM) simply runs better and is smaller

The company also has a priority on mobile, where the native targets in OpenFL are performing much better than the older Adobe AIR version.

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