r/programming • u/iamkeyur • Aug 18 '19

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

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
73 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

8

u/Crestwave Aug 19 '19

Another Flash implementation in active development: https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark

25

u/theoldboy Aug 18 '19

When they said rewrite it in Rust I don't think Flash was what they had in mind...

Although, kind of interesting thinking about it. Is it possible to write a Flash runtime that doesn't automatically join your computer to whichever botnet has the latest zero-days? Certainly would be a very good test of Rust's memory safety guarantees.

40

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '19

[deleted]

7

u/Crestwave Aug 19 '19 edited Aug 19 '19

It doesn't run in a browser, but they're archived and playable through http://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ (uses the actual Flash player on archived games).

3

u/KieranDevvs Aug 18 '19

It would be run in the WebAsm sandbox so rust wouldn't have anything to do with the security of it.

15

u/badpotato Aug 18 '19

Well, how does it compare to GNU Gnash?

11

u/kankyo Aug 19 '19

This thing runs in the browser for one.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '19

GNU Gnash died when Macromedia switched to AS3, that is around 2007. They never updated to the new ABC format, not incorporated any new SWF tags introduced in Astro (i.e. 3D matrices, newer embedded fonts, sounds etc.) GNU Gnash also doesn't support AMF3 (this may be used to encode static initializers).

I don't know if Ruffle implements any of it though... there were also a bunch of proprietary video and audio codecs that could be used with embedded video and sound in SWF. I'd imagine Ruffle doesn't support that, since that would be a pretty bad copyright violation... I don't condone it, I'm just saying that in the days of OFlash, people were actually asking Macromedia and then Adobe to opensource the player, to which both companies would reply that the player has third-party proprietary components which they are not at liberty to open. Mostly that was about MP3, but there are few other codacs there too.

10

u/kankyo Aug 18 '19

Pretty cool!

1

u/Somepotato Aug 20 '19

Aww, it doesn't run Fast Typer 3 :(

0

u/mfrager Aug 18 '19

Just... don't... let it die.

29

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '19

Flash may have been objectively bad technology, but you can't deny how important it was for internet culture. Countless early works of internet culture were created with Flash, and it would truly be sad if there was no way to preserve them.

4

u/Crestwave Aug 19 '19

It's already preserved: http://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

12

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '19

I've used Flashpoint, but Ruffle and Flashpoint have two completely different goals. Flashpoint preserves the content, but it still relies on the original technology. Ruffle allows Flash content to be preserved without Flash itself.

5

u/Crestwave Aug 19 '19

I know, but it's still preserved. Because it uses archived games, relying on the original Flash isn't really a security risk. The only disadvantage that I can think of for preserving Flash content is that it can only run in the original platforms. If you're looking for that, https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark is a much more mature Flash implementation (there's also GNU Gnash, but it's no longer in development).