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The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

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Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#11

Post by incrudible »

diggan wrote: post #10
incrudible wrote: post #8

> annoying flash ads Thank god that is a thing of the past, right? In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

ActionScript and JavaScript are basically the same language, considering the roots of them both and that they share 99% of the syntax and functionality, ActionScript being a "lite" version of JavaScript. They're definitely more similar than they are different. The only major difference (which is incidentally also probably why JS "won") was that JS came from development that happened out in the open, as FOSS, while Ac…

Not accurate, look up ActionScript 3 and the ECMAScript 4 kerfuffle.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#12

Post by tracker1 »

incrudible wrote: post #8

> annoying flash ads Thank god that is a thing of the past, right? In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

Since Typescript is largely borrowed from bits of ActionScript/ES4, people aren't missing much at all. TS+React isn't too different from AS3+Flex.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#13

Post by adrian17 »

dave333 wrote: post #7

How does this compare to say Flashpoint?

Very different kinds of projects. Flashpoint is concerned with archiving games and providing a one-stop desktop launcher for them. Ruffle reimplements the Flash Player, providing both a desktop player and a JS library that polyfills the FP plugin on a website, but the actual .swf file to run needs to be provided separately.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#14

Post by incrudible »

tracker1 wrote: post #12
incrudible wrote: post #8

> annoying flash ads Thank god that is a thing of the past, right? In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

Since Typescript is largely borrowed from bits of ActionScript/ES4, people aren't missing much at all. TS+React isn't too different from AS3+Flex.

The associated headaches with tooling and configuration do make it quite different.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#15

Post by bsder »

davidgerard wrote: post #5

There have been multiple open source Flash player efforts that get 70% of the way there and stall. I could surmise reasons, and so could you. But does anyone know the reason? Is there some common blocker that they all founder on or something?

Erm, because most things get to 70% and then stall?

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." —Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

The differences between something having 90% and 99% and 99.9% coverage is GIGANTIC at each step.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#16

Post by diggan »

incrudible wrote: post #11
diggan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActionScript and JavaScript are basically the same language, considering the roots of them both and that they share 99% of the syntax and functionality, ActionScript being a "lite" version of JavaScript. They're definitely more similar than they are different. The only major difference (which is incidentally also probably why JS "won") was that JS came from development that happened out in the open, as FOSS, while Ac…

Not accurate, look up ActionScript 3 and the ECMAScript 4 kerfuffle.

What do you mean is not accurate?

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#17

Post by adrian17 »

diggan wrote: post #10
incrudible wrote: post #8

> annoying flash ads Thank god that is a thing of the past, right? In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

ActionScript and JavaScript are basically the same language, considering the roots of them both and that they share 99% of the syntax and functionality, ActionScript being a "lite" version of JavaScript. They're definitely more similar than they are different. The only major difference (which is incidentally also probably why JS "won") was that JS came from development that happened out in the open, as FOSS, while Ac…

AS3 derives from the ES4 proposal, which honestly felt like a bigger shift than Python2->3 transition. In fact, AS3 came out after work on ES4 already ceased, so in my understanding, "the JS we know today" won even before AS3 came out.

Also referring to Brendan Eich's comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25388721 :

> When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#18

Post by tracker1 »

incrudible wrote: post #14
tracker1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Typescript is largely borrowed from bits of ActionScript/ES4, people aren't missing much at all. TS+React isn't too different from AS3+Flex.

The associated headaches with tooling and configuration do make it quite different.

I haven't had meat as much odor with vite or parcel. Let alone Deno or bun.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#19

Post by phendrenad2 »

Off-topic but I really want to try to get this idea out into the public subconsciousness: It's time for the open-source world to make a competitor to Flash.

"But can't JavaScript do everything Flash could do?" Nope, not even close.

"But isn't Ruffle good enough?" Not in my experience. It fails to the orange-screen-of-death on more than 50% of the flash ads/games/etc. on the Internet Archive.

"But wasn't Flash insecure?" Yep, but that's just bad implementation, not inherent to the concept of Flash.

"But Chrome won't support it because they're the new IE6 and they're stuck in the past" You know what, I don't have a good answer to that. ;(

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