Ruffle – An Adobe Flash Player Written in Rust Compiled to WebAssembly

by conroy • 7 years ago

206 70 7 years ago

mgamache3• 7 years ago

I really hope this works, but I fear it will die a shumway death. One of the issues is there are two complete run-times inside of Flash. AVM1 (for AS1/2) and AVM2 (for AS3). AS1/2 is much easier to program and probably emulate. AS3 was much more advanced and was actually a pretty good language. Adobe should release the source, but probably doesn't due to all the security holes that probably are waiting to be found. Of course, that is speculation.

[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript]

xeromal• 7 years ago

Google Swiffy too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Swiffy

fenomas3• 7 years ago

Adobe should release the source, but probably doesn't due to all the security holes that probably are waiting to be found. Of course, that is speculation.

The AS3 spec, compiler and runtime/VM are all open source, have been since at least 2008 IIRC. Details are in the wikipedia page you linked, third paragraph.

Aside: discussions of Flash or its legacy have an unfortunate tendency to get derailed by FUD, so it would perhaps be useful to avoid speculation like this where possible.

mgamache3• 7 years ago

The AS3 VM is helpful, but only part of the player. The fact remains there is no player source to use as a guide for porting to other languages. It’s similar to the .net scenario. MS releases .net core open source, but didn’t release the GUI parts (until recently).

robin_reala• 7 years ago

The AS3 VM was opensourced in 2006 (as Tamarin) and donated to Mozilla who planned to use it as a back-end inside Gecko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software)

whatever_dude• 7 years ago

Flash Player contains a host of third party, commercially licensed software inside of it. Its source will never be released and it has nothing to do with security.

brighteyes• 7 years ago

I really hope this works, but I fear it will die a shumway death.

Yes, it may find a niche subset of Flash content it can do well, but there have been many attempts at Flash replacements, and all of them have failed, including serious ones with corporate backing like Shumway. Another cool one is Lightspark [1]

The only real chance at 100% preservation of Flash content is for Adobe to open source all of it - the VMs, the runtime including the graphics, etc. - and to compile that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightspark

tgtweak• 7 years ago

I'm sort of at a loss to this.. flash was disliked because of three things, for the most part:

• Capability of ActionScript (which can harbor malware) along with potential vulnerabilities in the interpreter itself.

• Memory and CPU usage

• Proprietary

Does this rust variant even address all of these? Are we hoping to shim flash support into wasm-supported browsers? What good would this bring, specifically in regards to native flash's shortcomings?

Not trashing the project, cause it's actually really cool, just curious why.

simcop2387• 7 years ago

Putting it into WASM at least will deal with a lot of the potential issues that AS could have, simply because WASM doesn't have access to the outside world to attack anything.

As for RAM and CPU usage, there's not much that can likely be done. Better garbage collectors and other things like that might help but Flash itself was the cause of a lot of those problems.

If this was a full implementation it'd be something open source that could run flash files/movies, so it'd be a bit less proprietary. There still wouldn't be open source editors that could handle doing it all so it wouldn't be complete or even close as an ecosystem.

That said, all this could end up creating a good alternative for when all the browsers and adobe drop flash support in the next year (Firefox ESR is the only one I know of that's committed to supporting it until the end of 2020). A sane and safe migration path would be really useful for somewhere like newgrounds or archive.org to preserve internet history.

sjwright8• 7 years ago

• Largely assumed mouse/keyboard interaction and had no plausible mechanism for responsive design

• Proven track record of terrible security bugs

• Was most frequently used for ads

pjmlp10• 7 years ago

* It remains to be proven how WebAssembly is so much better than everything that came before it (hackers are yet to start having fun with exploits)

* Flash games market was huge

dplgk• 7 years ago

Flash handled responsive layouts a decade before the term even existed.

pjmlp10• 7 years ago

Outside the HN bubble, in the designers and game development community, Flash was loved.

* Powerful graphical tooling, where HTML/CSS are still catching up to

* Guarantee to actually have hardware acceleration, instead of CSS z-index tricks hoping for the best

* It was the first to support game engines on the Web, like Unreal

Unknown to many, Flash apps actually do exist on mobile, because Flash also AOT compiles to native code.

Causality1• 7 years ago

Additionally, Flash was an amazing medium for animation in the era before high speed internet. Because much of it is vector based, file sizes are very small and videos from 2003 scale perfectly onto a 4K monitor. Can't say that about any other internet videos from the pre-youtube era.

MrEldritch2• 7 years ago

It was also hugely loved among amateur artists and animators, which led to the creation of most of the vast array of creative works I enjoyed as a kid.

I don't think I've ever quite gotten over my resentment at the tech community for killing Flash in the name of "security".

rad_gruchalski• 7 years ago

Let’s not forget Flex and Air. These two were way ahead of its time. There is still no technology out there that would match the simplicity of these two combined.

clouddrover• 7 years ago

What good would this bring

The project's roadmap (https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap) says: "The Flash Player has existed since 1996, and there are millions of pieces of Flash content around the web. This content represents an important piece of computing history and culture ... Ruffle's chief goal is to preserve this legacy content and keep it accessible for the future."

I think that's a good goal.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu• 7 years ago

Memory and CPU usage

I don't understand why people keep repeating this. This is simply not true, Flash wasn't slow at all. It took HTML5+js+canvas years to catch up with Flash performance-wise.

Even after the introduction of GPU acceleration in browsers such as IE9 and Firefox 4, on typical machines of that period HTML5 was still far too slow for browser games, while Flash was usable even on Pentium III-era computers.

viraptor• 7 years ago

I don't understand why people keep repeating this.

IMO, it's because flash was not great with resources, but good enough to try advanced/creative things. Sure, canvas wasn't even a common thing at the time, when flash supported many video/graphics use cases.

But that meant people thought a few effects on the website was worth including a flash animation which pegged your CPU at 100% for a while. Or auto played some FLV which killed performance for the entire website.

The performance was also very platform dependent. "Linux can support 128 cores, but can't play YouTube without stuttering." was a meme, but also the truth for many users for a long time. Then Adobe pretty much abandoned the plugin support on Linux.

So sure, the tech was great, and many people implemented it - maybe too many and too early.

sjwright8• 7 years ago

I remember working at a major online publisher in 2006 and having to spend an entire week going through bureaucratic layer after bureaucratic layer because one of our advertisers' SWF files had a simple horizontal scrolling animation that was pegging the CPUs of our gutsy dev boxes at 100%.

Obviously it was possible to code competent stuff with Flash; that kind of competence tended to be limited to few expert publishers.

snek2• 7 years ago

Unlike flash player, this runs in the browser sandbox. It's limited to what WASM and JS can access. It's also OSS, so definitely not proprietary. I can't answer the resource usage part.

todd3834• 7 years ago

This is pretty great! I remember building stuff with Flash back when it was still owned by Macromedia. There is a solid level of nostalgia for me there. I know one of the major concerns became security with enabling the Flash player. I assume with WebAssembly as the compile target we don’t really have to worry about it as much? Does anyone know if we are going to start seeing things like memory leaks and buffer overflows with web assembly or is that not a thing? I know Rust does a lot to resolve memory issues but I’m wondering about the other languages that compile to web assembly.

Anyways, nice work!

thristian• 7 years ago

One of the big problems with things like Flash and Java on the web was that they were separate codebases from the browser, but (often) ran inside the browser's memory space, which was kind of a worst-of-both-worlds situation: multiple VMs each with their own individual vulnerabilities, but compromising any one would give you access to all of them.

WebAssembly is different because it's built around the high-performance JavaScript VMs that have been developed over the past decade or so. When a browser-maker fixes a security hole in their VM, it's fixed for JavaScript and WebAssembly at the same time, because they're built on the same foundation.

So no, you don't have to worry about security as much with WebAssembly - not because of any magical security properties WebAssembly has, but because even though the WebAssembly API is new, the security environment has seen decades of hardening.

gridlockd• 7 years ago

WASM can't magically make memory-unsafe languages memory-safe. You can still have memory leaks and buffer overflows, but (assuming a correct WASM implementation) a buffer overflow can not result in memory access outside the WASM instance's memory space - unless you provide it with the facilities to do so.

pjmlp10• 7 years ago

It is finally happening! Nice to know about it.

tomjuggler• 7 years ago

This is petty cool, is there anything similar for Java applets, remember those?

yuri91• 7 years ago

There is Cheerpj[0].

You can compile any JAR into js, and there is even a Chrome extension to conveniently run Applets found in the wild[1].

[0] https://www.leaningtech.com/cheerpj/

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cheerpj-applet-run...

vr463• 7 years ago

One point about this project and others like it is that we really ought to not lose all the content created over more than a decade of Flash development. From Orisinal to Yugop, that work shaped the Internet and web today and should be preserved.

milchek• 7 years ago

I spent several years working primarily with Flash. I started originally with Director and Lingo, then moved to Flash and ActionScript. I built games, microsites, campaigns, competitions, a whole bunch of annoying Facebook apps, you name it. This was back in the day when I was whoring myself out to ad agencies as a freelancer and mostly working on brand/campaign stuff.

Looking back on it, I have nothing I can show for it, really, besides some screenshots here and there. Pretty much all of the sites and projects are gone. It's a bit of a shame. This industry changes and moves forward at a lightning pace.

Some of the other people from my uni went into motion graphics and they can at least use examples of ads or animations from over a decade ago in their showreels. We can't really do that as web developers because of the dynamic nature of the medium.

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

You can always take screenshots and document things yourself. Portfolios are usually pictures of your work and descriptions not a full blown browser executable.

vr463• 7 years ago

Before everything went south, I recorded screen movies of some of my games in action, and grabbed some other visuals. Of course they're at postage stamp resolution by modern standards, but it's something. As far as looking back on my body of work as an old man goes, at least I have a lot of other things to look back on, but a whole chunk is probably lost to the ether.

enturn• 7 years ago

I've read that OpenFL supports some features of swf assets.

bobajeff• 7 years ago

This is really cool. Just imagining all the work involved and the developers seem very knowledgeable and optimistic about it. I think it'd be cool glean some insight from them about runtimes and standards.

I wish them the best of luck on their path to full compatibility with Adobe flash.

justinclift2• 7 years ago

Hopefully it can be made to work with Realm of the Mad God, a popular game from years back:

https://www.realmofthemadgod.com :)

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

If you download the swf file (for me, the link was https://www.realmofthemadgod.com/AssembleeGameClient15656887...), this seems to run fine in the standalone "Flash Player Projector", a great little utility buried in Adobe's website that that let's you load swf files outside of a web browser. https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...

I didn't bother creating an account, but the game opened fine and everything.

justinclift2• 7 years ago

Thanks, that seems to work.

Couldn't log in properly, but that seems to be a server issue on their end. Support ticket opened, so we'll see. :)

JetSpiegel• 7 years ago

This on AUR:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/realmofthemadgod/

snek2• 7 years ago

I really hope that the web archive can put this to good use, similar to how they emulate MS-DOS games in browser.

Ruffle – An Adobe Flash Player Written in Rust Compiled to WebAssembly

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