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Comment by ed | Hacker News Reader

Crashing in a managed environment like Flash is never the developer's fault. These issues are either introduced by the browser vendor or Adobe.

It's worth noting that Adobe is very reluctant to deprecate API's. They've historically preferred (with AVM1/AVM2) bundling new VM's into the player over deprecating features. And any deprecation must be version-specific, and tends to be more for API consistency than anything else.

What really disappoints me is Adobe's reluctance to support really neat Labs projects like Alchemy. Want to run C (or any language which compiles to C, like haskell!) in the browser? It's been possible since Flash 9, way before NaCl. Official support is coming soon but it's a bit too bad it took so long.

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Haskell doesn't really compile to C, unfortunately.

The (deprecated) via-c backend of GHC compiled to something that looked like C, but depended on a horrible Perl script to post-process the object output.

It does have an LLVM backend these days, though, maybe that can work?

"What really disappoints me is Adobe's reluctance to support really neat Labs projects like Alchemy."

I can't tell if you're saying you know or not, but Alchemy is becoming an official product:

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/09/updates-from-the-...

"Crashing in a managed environment is never the developer's fault" !!!

WHAT? Are you serious? Please educate us as to how that is done.

How can you fault a managed system? Addresses are a few abstractions below the developer.

For me there are many real world cases which can't be handled without showing the user a fatal error.

E.g. - the developer asks for an runtime created asset that doesn't exist anymore or there's a condition under which a block of code runs forever (actually in this case the flash runtime stops after 15 seconds of activity and allows the user to kill it but it's still a "crash" insofar as the user is concerned.

But Flash often crashes way worse than that; it segfaults, or raises a structured exception. It used to take browser processes with it, before Chrome made it popular to have plugins in their own process.

I suspect Flash's (lack of) stability was one of the reasons for considering this design decision in Chrome.

He's right though it depends what you mean by a "crash".

An unhandled exception due to referencing a null object that caused the Flash app to crash? Developer's fault, not Adobe's.

A crash that brings down the entire Flash runtime (and possibly the browser hosting it)? Adobe(or the browser vendor)'s fault, not the developers.

Even if the developer does something horribly stupid in ActionScript, the runtime should never die due to developer error.

Agreed. But most of the crashes I see are of the former type (I.e developers fault).

I honestly can't remember ever seeing a Flash crash actually bring down the the browser. Maybe I've been very lucky.

I see that I'm getting down voted for calling 'ED' out on his sweeping statement where he did not define what he meant by a "crash". Note that for many users a "crash" is when what ever App/game/web-page they are running stops with some error and they can't continue. My basic point is that many (most??) of these, in my experience, are down to developer error.

Many developers seem to have an irrational "hate-fest" going against Flash. For sure there's a lot wrong with it but, for me, all to often "its not the tool but the craftsman at fault".

People are definitely referring to Flash taking down the browser (or crashing the plugin in Chrome and Safari, which have plugin sandboxes). Personally, I've seen "Plug-in Failure" several times even though I rarely visit sites that feature Flash. Steve Jobs wrote that "we know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash."

It isn't irrational. It's quite simply that my laptop fans run loudly when I'm using flash, draining the battery while not using flash doesn't run my fans or drain my battery. It's a pretty simply complaint. Flash is a power and resource hog for very little upside.

Because the whole point of it being managed is that you can't crash it, and if you can it's a bug.

Agreed.

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