“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020” • Hacker News Board

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#491

Post by bigbugbag » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

amitt wrote: post #107

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

> 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

Would that have been a major loss for humanity as a whole ? Farmville improved the life of how many people ? how many hours wasted, people made miserable and money lifted from cash cows ?

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#492

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 12:13 AM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #467

tracker1 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silverlight was available on Mac and Windows, and Moonlight was available on Linux. Again, the plugin itself didn't have to be open-sourced, the format was, which is why Moonlight worked.

In my opinion having Linux support done by community and lagging behind in features and in release scheduling is not cross-platform, Flash had the advantage in this point, Adobe AIR also worked on linux until a point. Do you think that having this platforms opened source would help or not the adoption? Looking at Java I see it is still going strong with plenty on languages, tools and libraries/frameworks still going…

My entire point wasn't that Silverlight was/wasn't open sourced... it was that the underlying structure was FAR closer to what I thought was a good package structure, compared to .SWF

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#493

Post by niutech » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 12:22 AM UTC

seanalltogether wrote: post #8

> will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Adobes stance on backwards compatibility in Flash has always been "Don't break the web". Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists around the web after 2020? As far as I know, those JS emulators are way to slow for most content.

Don't worry, you will still be able to run SWF files after 2020 using the latest Flash Player Standalone Projector, Swiff Player, iSwiffy, Eltima SWF Player, Gnash, etc.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#494

Post by niutech » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 12:27 AM UTC

larsiusprime wrote: post #34

yoodenvranx wrote: post #14

Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve them?

There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of those discussions. Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically there. It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after. 1) "Emulation" style: -- Open source flash player (a la Shumway) 2) "Automated Conversion" style: -- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML…

No need for converting existing SWF files - you will be able to play them after 2020 using the Flash Player Standalone Projector or Swiff Player.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#495

Post by ivm » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 4:38 AM UTC

MrBra wrote: post #488

ivm wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML5 toolset is too fragmented and developer-oriented. Unity is humongous and WebGL builds are too big. There's no replacement for Flash.

What's your opinion on Haxe?

It may be ok for developers but the Flash scene was full of non-developers who used mostly the visual Flash editor and copy-pasted some scripts if necessary.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#496

Post by virgilp » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 8:19 AM UTC

vr46 wrote: post #443

virgilp wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome! (though I only worked on a small part of it - vector/SIMD instruction support, for gaming usecases) I think a lot of the stuff that screwed the language was that it was initially supposed to be "an evolution of javascript" (ecmascript 4? I forget), so it took a on lot of the undesirable features of JavaScript, it was never a complete break from it. Also, Adobe made a big-ish mistake in that it didn't…

Hey, hello! I know there were features that AS3 couldn't access, but other languages like Haxe could. Would you be able to elaborate more on the VM/runtime issues?

Well, see e.g. https://blog.semantiscope.com/2009/10/29/getting-pointers-fr... ; the Flash runtime relied in various places on how pointers are represented for various "smart tricks"/optimizations. While this may have had the local effect of being faster, it also had the side effect of making global optimizations in the VM harder, since the VM was limited in the ways it could change. With the flash runtime codebase being pretty large, and the team being fairly paranoid about backwards compatibility ("you don't want to be the one who breaks the internet!"), this slowed down change quite a bit. Sure, it was easy to add new features - but it was pretty hard to improve how the old ones were working.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#497

Post by simion314 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 9:15 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #492

simion314 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion having Linux support done by community and lagging behind in features and in release scheduling is not cross-platform, Flash had the advantage in this point, Adobe AIR also worked on linux until a point. Do you think that having this platforms opened source would help or not the adoption? Looking at Java I see it is still going strong with plenty on languages, tools and libraries/frameworks still going…

My entire point wasn't that Silverlight was/wasn't open sourced... it was that the underlying structure was FAR closer to what I thought was a good package structure, compared to .SWF

Does it contained dlls in the package ? swf are similar to .NEt dlls

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#498

Post by simion314 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 9:46 AM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #172

simion314 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

I worked extensively with flex, and I think you give it too much credit. Typescript beats AS3, and modern complete frameworks like angular or ember are just as good as flex.

TS is a good language that AS3 users would prefer, but it is new, there was Haxe but it does not has a giant behind it. I am not sure what is a good alternative to Flex, React is the one that seems closer because you have a render function that you can implement and you have the markup but you are still missing a collection of built in, good quality components, I see a lot of projects wrapping in angular or React jQuery components(callendars, color pickers), In Flex you had this components and you could customize them with item renderers and you can extend them with inheritance.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#499

Post by simion314 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 9:50 AM UTC

petetnt wrote: post #294

Joeri wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked extensively with flex, and I think you give it too much credit. Typescript beats AS3, and modern complete frameworks like angular or ember are just as good as flex.

Same. My first programming job was doing Flex stuff (Adobe Air desktop apps in an enterprisy way) and after that I did tons of Edge Animate work (in an environment where things needed to run in IE9 at best). I am glad those helped me to kickstart my career, but modern JS libraries, frameworks and paragdims are so much ahead what we had then I can only wonder if I have truly forgotten something really magnificient.

What JS combination of tools can you use to get similar to Flex, you would have to add a build tool, some JS framework like angular or react+friends then bootstrap or similar to get some basic widgets or pick the widgets you need from the web(ex pick a jQuery advanced calendar widget and wrap it in angular or React , I saw a lot of code that did bad such wrappings that were single use)

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#500

Post by simion314 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 11:48 AM UTC

disease wrote: post #146

simion314 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

Flex had some good ideas but many things made it a pretty bad experience to work with: Adobe abandoning WYSIWYG editing in Flash Builder, having two ways to do everything (XML and code) made things more confusing than it had to be, and the official components from Adobe generally weren't very good. I much prefer building by own in React. AS3 was awesome for its time but TypeScript has surpassed it in my opinion. Afte…

Do you have WYSIWYG in React? How much it will take you to implement from scratch in React an AdvancedDataGrid ? I also like TS and React is my favorite way of rendering SPAs, unfortunately at my work we are stuck with JS,and angular1 so the fact that there may be nice things but are not built-in into html5/js is a huge issue. Also how can I ask my boss or the other devs to start using X when next year X may be bad or outdated.