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A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

github.com

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Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#21

Post by fooker »

dleslie wrote: post #4

I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or entertaining animation in less than an hour. The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

> The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

The tool is exactly the same and it outputs html\js now.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#22

Post by bArray »

Bring flash support back to the web! Would be awesome that if that not only are they able to emulate the flash media player, but also fix the security issues too. Perhaps that's naturally what an emulator will give you?

We should probably also be thinking about how browser support may continue for JavaScript in the future too. It's a matter of time until WASM reaches mainstream adoption.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#23

Post by jayd16 »

dleslie wrote: post #4

I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or entertaining animation in less than an hour. The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

Whats missing from modern tools?

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#25

Post by danbolt »

jayd16 wrote: post #23
dleslie wrote: post #4

I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or entertaining animation in less than an hour. The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

Whats missing from modern tools?

I don’t think anything feature-wise is missing on the runtime side, but Flash’s keyframe/editor setup just let people make the most amazing things.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#26

Post by Shared404 »

howenterprisey wrote: post #24

So here's a silly question. If you can just get the official "projector" from Adobe (Flashpoint's approach?), what's Ruffle for? (Edit: Removed the last sentence, which was unhelpful.)

IIRC, Ruffle can be embedded in webpages, which I don't think the official projector can do.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#27

Post by Shared404 »

imhoguy wrote: post #18
villgax wrote: post #12

Please FFS let flash die a peaceful death

Please not. Such projects are essential for historical preservation. Shall we let C64, Atari die too and stop improving emulators?

Yeah, Flash-the-platform can die for all I care.

Flash-the-content needs to be preserved, and Ruffle seems like a promising step towards that.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#28

Post by gabereiser »

danbolt wrote: post #25
jayd16 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats missing from modern tools?

I don’t think anything feature-wise is missing on the runtime side, but Flash’s keyframe/editor setup just let people make the most amazing things.

Stickdeath comes to mind. 2advanced studios work. All the amazing bitmap effects. Flash was really easy to create interactive scenes as your site. Each one different from another. Each one a masterpiece of art and layers and effects taken from gaming and VFX/Film. I miss that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad flash it dead, but I really miss the beautiful sites it enabled.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#29

Post by emi2k01 »

fulafel wrote: post #9
nynx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lmao, only if you write something other than rust

There's a lot of unsafe usage in this codebase ( https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/search?q=unsafe returns 5 screenfuls) - though I don't know enough about Rust to tell how risky these are.

Around 3.5 of those pages are unsafe uses for implementing the same trait for garbage collection. The implementations seem very simple and the documentation mentions invariants that are easy to hold so it should be easy to recognize an unsound implementation. I think that it should be possible to not use unsafe at all for some of those but I only skimmed over the code so I'm not sure.

Most of the rest of unsafe uses are to skip rust checks that have already been asserted and for FFI which is unavoidable.

There are only a few unsafe uses whose invariants are not well defined. I only gave it a quick look but I doubt they're risky.

Even if an attacker manages to exploit ruffle, I wonder what could they do in a WASM sandbox in an isolated domain.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#30

Post by echelon »

jayd16 wrote: post #23
dleslie wrote: post #4

I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously, provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or entertaining animation in less than an hour. The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.

Whats missing from modern tools?

Flash was really special.

The design philosophy behind flash was to let you make animations and interactive content.

The design philosophy behind html/css/js/web stack is a composable system of modules that can be bundled, used to center objects, and plumb state to components.

Flash was on another level. The web hasn't been the same since it left us.

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