Lightspark: LLVM-based Flash Player for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Lightspark: LLVM-based Flash Player for Linux

lightspark.sourceforge.net

158 pointsmmc13 comments

When (I'm hoping it's 'when') this becomes stable I'm thinking a Mac port of this would make a lot of people happy. Despite Steve's fighting words I think most Mac users out there would prefer not to be second-class citizens on the web, and this could be a big step in that direction.

PS. Apologies for stealing your thunder there, Linux people, I just see the average Mac user wanting [a decent flash player] more than the average Linux user.

Linux users do have a decent flash player. We have hardware acceleration! Apple only recently released the required video API for the flash player.

So far, my impression was that the problem with building a Flash implementation isn't so much the language runtime as everything else - rendering, video, audio, input, etc. Isn't Tamarin [1] enough to run ActionScript 3?

FWIW, I realise that this has an advanced implementation of some graphical features and I'm not trying to belittle it, it seems an impressive effort. I'm just curious what's currently holding back a full implementation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(JavaScript_engine)

Tamarin is what runs AS3 in the Adobe Flash Player.

Exactly. And it's open source. So my question is: why re-invent that part? The other bits seem more pressing for practical use, even if Tamarin isn't as fast as it could be or whatever.

Who knows, what about V8? Maybe V8 is better, on that note would be interesting if browsers exposed their JS engine to Flash so that any browser improvements to javascript would also improve flash performance, instead of duplicating effort and having adobe do crap with actionscript it all just runs on one engine and vuala.

Pipe dream or reality?

http://allievi.sssup.it/techblog/?p=260

Has a little more info

So does this read actionscript, or straight from the .swf?

Reads the bytecode straight from the swf. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks to be a lot further along than Gnash was.

The two projects appear to have implemented different parts of flash. Flash has several separate virtual machines, which have been introduced over the years with new versions of flash.

Lightspark only implements the newer ActionScript3 runtime, from Flash 9 (and newer), while Gnash only (?) implements some of the earlier runtimes.

Currently Lightspark can only run the newer HD youtube player (which is compiled against flash 9), and Gnash can only run the older player (Which I think is still used for VP6 videos)

Just to clarify, the flash runtime only has two actionscript virtual machines: AVM and AVM2. AVM2 was a complete rewrite for actionscript 3 (AS3) and was introduced for Flash 9. The original AVM supports Flash 8 and below (AS1 and AS2).

Gnash never got around to supporting AVM2 (it's not at all trivial), which is why Lightspark is significant. That, along with better hardware acceleration which might actually help it outperform the official player!

Tried to install a couple of days ago; it builds with tweaks but crashes on my up-to-date Arch Linux install.

I don't desire flash so much that this matters.

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