Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

If we hadn't lost a decade with what Flash and PNACL already offered us in 2011...

No wonder studios rather bet on streaming than a tech that will never deliver.

Let's be clear what Flash was though. It was a native binary that would paint to a region owned by the browser. So yes, it was performant because basically the only thing it was doing differently than any other native application was how it was hosted by the browser.

That's also why it was such a security nightmare. It was a complete escape from the browser sandbox.

It was a great development experience, destroyed by pitch forks and lanterns by the folks that a decade later have failed to deliver a sound alternative.

Hence why the gaming industry is focusing on streaming instead.

Flash was destroyed by Apple, which had no interest in improving the web either. The iOS platform turned out to be a pretty good replacement for Flash though.

Apparently people keep forgetting that after that memo, Adobe produced an AOT compiler for Flash, targeting iOS.

Sure, but what's the point if it's not supported by Safari. Adobe Air was at best a porting aid to get your old Flash code wrapped in an iOS app, but the writing was on the wall and nobody in their right mind would start new Flash projects.

And now a decade later, despite PlayCanvas and Babylonjs, there is hardly anything that compares.

Mobile, handhelds and cloud streaming, is where the indie party is going on.

I bet WebGPU is going to be equally the same, ShaderToy and 3D commerce visualisation tools will be updated for it, and that is it.

Specially given that it made the same mistake of WebGL, lagging 10 years behind native APIs.

PNaCl was a joke though, it suffered from much longer client-side compilation times than both asm.js and WASM ever had, and performance was at most on par with asm.js.

(NaCl was better in those areas, but required to stamp out one binary for each target CPU architecture)

A joke that was able to deliver more than WASM/WebGL have yet to deliver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com