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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

No word on the last-I-heard-now-abandoned Shumway project. :(

Don't get me wrong I'm glad we can call flash dead but unless Adobe open sources it, we need a project like shumway for archival purposes.

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Shumway was a great project and it's definitely unfortunate that it was abandoned. I completely agree with you that keeping old content available is important. Using the DOM was definitely the right choice. Over the last few weeks I started to split Shumway into smaller packages so it's easier to work on it. For the moment I have a typed AST, a parser and a render for shapes with solid fills, they are all written both in Rust and Typescript (updated to the latest version). The biggest challenge remains the documentation and VM but Adobe open-sourced the FlexSDK and AVMPlus so you can find lot of information in the source code. I still don't know if I'll try to update the Shumway VM or write Rust bindings for AVMPlus and try to compile it to something like Wasm. Basically, for the moment it's at the very beginning so I don't know if it will even be useful, but I am determined to work on it and if it fail I could then help for some other projects such as Lightspark (which still seems somewhat maintained even if the activity dropped). Say what you want but losing Flash is losing a great part of the history of the internet, for all its problems it's worth preserving.

That's very cool, do you have a repo somewhere I could browse?

Sure, I cannot upload it right now but I'll push the latest versions this evening.

Even if my goal is to have small packages (it lowers the barrier to entry and allows to version components independently), it also creates some friction during the prototyping phase when I need a change across all the components. That's why I mostly work with local symlinked directories and neglected the online repos, but I'll fix it ;)

Here you go: https://github.com/open-flash/meta

As I already mentioned above, it's still in the early stages and I don't know how it will end, but I sure hope that there will be a solution ready once Adobe discontinues Flash.

There's going to be a lot of content like flash games that will not be ported to HTML. For these, wouldn't it make sense to run them in a locked-down VM, using the last flash version, rather than re-implementing Flash from scratch?

An interesting solution could be to work at the SWF level instead of the Player level. Instead of rewriting, porting or locking down the Player, could it be possible to automatically translate SWF files to another format?

I am fairly certain that there was some work about this but I'm not sure if anything succeeded. Regarding the ActionScript part, a plausible solution would be to target Haxe with the OpenFl library. OpenFl is a Haxe library exposing the same API as Flash so you can use it to compile projects to the targets supported by Haxe (JS, C++, ...). Some advanced AS code could be tricky to translate, but using untyped sections and restricting it to JS it could maybe be possible?

I remember hearing about some attempts to do this, I thought they had got fairly advanced. A quick search brings up a project called Smokescreen, which could play some flash. However, the project's website no longer exists. There's a github project - https://github.com/cesmoak/smokescreen but the last commit was in 2011.

Thanks for the link, it's definitely interesting. Unfortunately it seems that most of the open source Flash projects died out around 2011-2012.

What I had in mind was more about converting the programs (SWF files) instead of fixing the VM. I know that there were some open source VMs, but were there some successful attempts at converting SWF files to a different format?

I've seen a few solutions to Flash's death pop up yesterday and today..all dead github projects. My hope is that the official announcement from Adobe will reinvigorate those developers or inspire new ones to pick up the mantle on continue on.

You need the entire Flash Player APIs implemented, graphics, audio, video , just translating the bytecode from the swf won't be enough, I think is similar to Java , it is useless if you can compile or run Java code if you do not have the entire base/core libraries converted and the ability to load any third party libraries.

That's what I do with vmware, the most recent vsphere 6.5 can only be controlled via a flash interface (the html5 ui is missing far, far too many features to be used...) so you can make a windows image that's very strongly firewalled (like, say, the only ipv4 dest address for tcp syn packets allowed is the vcenter server...) and that works well.

Because it would be hilarious to need to access the system to bring up the system but the image can't run because the system's not up, keep a copy of the image laying around ready for any desktop running vmware workstation. I also keep a vcenter laying around for desktop use which has occasionally come in handy.

In the free software world someone would provide a virtualization appliance ready to run, but there are too many copyrights and lawyers involved. There's probably an illegal torrent out there somewhere, I suppose if you really trust your firewall it couldn't be that bad.

vmware is the last "serious" "general purpose" thing I'm aware of that requires flash.

While it's certainly possible, it's not always convenient, especially when you want integration with other pages, etc. Think about software for schools, for instance.

If it's practical and if they care enough, maybe a way forward is for Adobe to do a WebAssembly build of Flash player.

Flash Player already uses the Pepper-based PPAPI in Chrome, and Pepper is what Google created for NaCl content to use. I wonder, then, if Flash could be ported fairly simply to pepper.js.

It was hard to find, but we recently tried one legacy flash movie we have with it and it worked well, it was just a bit resized. It would be wonderful if somone picked it up

There's a standalone Flash Player, no?

There used to be one distributed w/ the Flash IDE; but I'm not sure if it was ever distributed stand alone.

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