The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by floatboth » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 3:29 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #149

floatboth wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers. JavaScript is also a compile target in a sandbox. Emscripten started with outputting plain JS, then that was optimized to asm.js, now optimized to WASM. I completely agree that WASM should NOT replace JS for normal DOM apps. It's currently possible through awkward calls into JS, and might be possible in the future more directly, but there's no need t…

> WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers. No, it does not. Compiling to WASM is not a replacement or synonym for compiling to JavaScript. JavaScript is not locked in a sandbox, in the same way, as it has a multitude of APIs. WASM does not have such APIs as it is just the sandbox. Here is the deal. All modern browsers now claim to support WASM. If WASM were capable of replacing JavaScript i…

Javascript also does not have access to the chrome of the browser. Unless it's running in a WebExtension context, in which case you can also run WASM there.

WASM can CALL INTO JAVASCRIPT CODE. Which means it can do anything JS can do — in a "clunky hack" kind of way, sure, but people are building sugar on top of this already: https://github.com/koute/stdweb

So it's not the kind of sandbox you're thinking about. It's literally the same sandbox as JavaScript itself.

Also, I just realized — you're probably thinking of "compiling to JS" as in TypeScript/BuckleScript/Elm/ghcjs/ScalaJS/… — and yeah, that isn't easy to replace, because you'd have to implement a whole garbage collected runtime for WASM currently and that's kinda ridiculous.

Others (including me) are thinking of "compiling" as in Emscripten, and WASM was literally created to optimize this at first.

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

#202

Post by jancsika » Mon, Dec 25, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #171

jancsika wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Specs are already released, although not complete. Look around Adobe's website for "SWF file format specification".

What's missing?

Is what is missing the part that made efforts like Gnash fail?

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

#203

Post by Decade » Tue, Dec 26, 2017, 9:46 AM UTC

merdreubu wrote: post #197

Decade wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my recollection, Java was pushed into browsers as part of Sun’s Write Once Run Anywhere strategy. Browser makers went along because it was the era when everybody wanted to be a platform for plugins. Then Microsoft tried to control the development of Java on Windows, and that was a mess. The Java plugin was a pain. The runtime took somewhere on the order of 10 seconds to load, and the browser was completely unrespo…

It was Macromedia that made Flash, not Adobe. Adobe just ignored it and is now killing it. Edit: Adobe also killed 2 other brilliant Macromedia products, right after acquisition, Fireworks and Freehand.

Right. I remembered that Adobe bought Macromedia, but I thought the acqui-kill was earlier. I was getting the story of Macromedia mixed up with Aldus. And actually, Flash came from FutureWave Software, before Macromedia acquired that company.

But Adobe did not ignore Flash. They may have mismanaged it, but they did invest in it, and tried to push Flash into places it does not belong (AIR, and especially PDF). They also tried to turn ActionScript 3.0 into ECMAscript 4.

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html

Now that the Flash runtime is becoming banned, Adobe renamed the Flash Professional content creation program to Adobe Animate, and made it able to export to some flavor of HTML5. The content creation is where they make the money, after all.