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Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

benjamin.smedbergs.us

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Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#3

Post by mcpherrinm »

This is pretty exciting. Flash player has never been my favourite piece of software, so having a reasonable alternative would be fantastic.

I know there's also Gnash, but I haven't tried it in a long time, and I'm led to believe it is far from feature complete. Hopefully this project can push further.

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#5

Post by syg »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

Pretty nice. The madness of interpreters on top of interpreters is not lost on my but still fun.

To be more precise, JITs on top of JITs. :)

We have both an interpreter for ActionScript bytecode as well as a compiler that compiles that bytecode method-at-a-time to JavaScript using a restructuring approach like emscripten's relooper.

Disclaimer: I work on Shumway.

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#6

Post by emmelaich »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #3

This is pretty exciting. Flash player has never been my favourite piece of software, so having a reasonable alternative would be fantastic. I know there's also Gnash, but I haven't tried it in a long time, and I'm led to believe it is far from feature complete. Hopefully this project can push further.

If you're interested in Gnash you might be interested in

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightspark

"Lightspark is a free and open source SWF player"

Still in beta.

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#7

Post by richforrester »

Being more of a designer than a developer, I've got to admit that the thought of second wind for Flash kind of scares me. I've never liked Flash, mainly because historically it wasn't as "open" as HTML, Macromedia Flash (I know, right) crashed a lot, as well as the general abuse of Flash found all around the web in the late 90's/early 2k.

Anyone willing/able to take my (probably irrational) fear away and tell me why this SWF interpreter is a good thing?

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#9

Post by thristian »

I have good hopes for this (Mozilla's HTML5-based PDF reader is my favourite PDF browser plugin), but I'm a little worried - there have been a lot of Open Source Flash reimplementations, and so far as I can tell they all have early success and pretty demos of older Flash content, but are completely useless on most real-world Flash usage, like nearly any site that shows a video.

I'll note that Gnash does actually work on YouTube.com, but only because YouTube seems to deliberately serve an ancient version of their Flash player, rather than the latest version with the closed-captions and text overlays and all that stuff.

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#10

Post by jpwagner »

woogley wrote: post #8

Interesting to see tobeytailor (of Gordon[1]) working on this. Is this built on the same code Gordon uses? [1]: https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/

I don't know, but I would guess it is, if only because "Gordon Shumway" is the alias of ALF from the 80s tv show.
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