A Flash Player emulator written in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#131

Post by newswasboring » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 8:37 AM UTC

andai wrote: post #127

newswasboring wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets call a spade a spade. Its not "Eccentric", he either has serious mental health issues or is an American far right conspiracy theorist. And don't you go implying that all American far right conspiracy theorists have mental health issues, that is not proven or even logical in many ways.

The man's talking about prophecies, comets and reptilians.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a member of United States congress literally blamed forest fires on Jewish space lasers. It's hard to discern these days who has mental issues and who is just conspiracy theorist. Unless a doctor has diagnosed someone I will reserve my judgement

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#132

Post by vfclists » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 12:18 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #117

vfclists wrote: post #61

People think of it as being for games, but high quality applications used it as UI, a lot still do. Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems. Todays mobile CPUs are an order of magnitude way more powerful than those of 10 years ago. The performance issue doesn't apply now. As for bugs, they can be fixed and they could have been fixed with the passage of time. The whole agenda of aiming t…

>Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems. No. There was always a lot of Flash hate around, but it was tolerated because prior to HTML5 set of standards and the massive investment in JS performance, there was no way to do certain things in HTML/JS, so there was space for Flash. Post 2010 it became hard to justify Flash because you could now replicate everything Flash could do (though may…

The browser is unlikely to be a target for writing games it is crippled as a medium for playing games, or as you put it in a "more clunky way".

> The younguns who were writing browser-based Flash games in 2004, are writing mobile games today, and the browser is not a popular gaming target anymore (with some exceptions here and there).

Don't those games have to be sold though app stores where Google and Apple take their 30% cut?

On the question of a "more clunky way", how come 10 years after Flash was banned, despite improvements in hardware performance, HTML/JS capabilities and development tools have not evolved to surpass Flash?

Could that be because the companies that control the apps stores are the same ones in charge of the HTML/JS standards, and even neglect to implement some of the standards when they might make games and animation development "less clunky"?

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#133

Post by mlindner » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 12:53 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #53

ink_13 wrote: post #11

I first heard about this project when it saved homestarrunner.com from the dead. I'm glad it exists, there's a lot of 2000's-era web history wrapped up in Flash.

Homestarrunner was mostly not interactive so they could have just converted everything to video (I bet it is on YouTube already).

Converting vector images to raster images forever fixes the resolution of the images. Also flash can be much higher framerate than a fixed raster video framerate.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#134

Post by slig » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

vfclists wrote: post #61

People think of it as being for games, but high quality applications used it as UI, a lot still do. Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems. Todays mobile CPUs are an order of magnitude way more powerful than those of 10 years ago. The performance issue doesn't apply now. As for bugs, they can be fixed and they could have been fixed with the passage of time. The whole agenda of aiming t…

Flash performance was abysmal on Mac OSX since forever and Adobe couldn't be bothered to fix. They gave up the Apple ecosystem and the whole Flash thing even before the iPhone.

Re: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust

#135

Post by macspoofing » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

vfclists wrote: post #132

macspoofing wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap ecosystems. No. There was always a lot of Flash hate around, but it was tolerated because prior to HTML5 set of standards and the massive investment in JS performance, there was no way to do certain things in HTML/JS, so there was space for Flash. Post 2010 it became hard to justify Flash because you could now replicate everything Flash could do (though may…

The browser is unlikely to be a target for writing games it is crippled as a medium for playing games, or as you put it in a "more clunky way". > The younguns who were writing browser-based Flash games in 2004, are writing mobile games today, and the browser is not a popular gaming target anymore (with some exceptions here and there). Don't those games have to be sold though app stores where Google and Apple take the…

>On the question of a "more clunky way", how come 10 years after Flash was banned, despite improvements in hardware performance, HTML/JS capabilities and development tools have not evolved to surpass Flash?

That's not true. JavaScript is still a terrible language, but if you're building a full-fledged web application, you're going to be writing it in TypeScript or Dart - and those languages are much better than AS3, and they do have sophisticated tooling.

In terms of performance, I would say that as of maybe 3-4 years ago HTML/CSS/JavaScript surpassed Flash in every browser outside of IE (IE JavaScript performance is dog-shit, and Flash is still king there).

So if you're building what was traditional known as a RIA or even a game, the HTML/CSS/JS front-end stack is much more comprehensive than Flash/AS3/Flex. I say that as someone who was a fan of Flash, and who wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code in AS3. Our company also leveraged alchemy/FlasCC for performance as well - which was transitioned to asm.js/WebAssembly (another way that Flash was really ahead of its time). Stage3D is easily replaced by WebGL. We're actually using a dart framework called StageXL, which mimics the Flash display list API because Flash display list (API and implementation) was really sophisticated for building vector animation-based apps (games or UIs).

I can't speak to the traditional use-case of Flash providing a WYSIWYG editor for creating vector animation and how that looks like in HTML, but I think people just prefer video now because vector animation can't be hosted on YouTube and can't be monetized in the same way. So sadly, the 'vector animation culture' became 'YouTube video content culture'

>Could that be because the companies that control the apps stores are the same ones in charge of the HTML/JS standards, and even neglect to implement some of the standards when they might make games and animation development "less clunky"?

No. For one thing, it was the app store companies, like Google, and Apple, that drove the exponential improvements in HTML/CSS/JS ecosystem to make it viable. In fact, companies like Google are still pushing these standards forward and increasing the capabilities of browsers.

I think you will agree that there is nothing that can be done in Flash today, that couldn't be done in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The reverse isn't necessarily true.

One last bit, I don't know if you remember but there was a brief period in which Adobe attempted to monetize flash. They actually wanted a license fee for the right to use the high-performance opcodes (as provided by alchemy/FlasCC) without even providing something like an app-store. They backtracked pretty quick because it was an idiotic move.