Ruffle Continues Letting Adobe Flash Player Support Live On In Open-Source

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ruffle Continues Letting Adobe Flash Player Support Live On In Open-Source

Most of you have fortunately not had to think about Adobe Flash support in years, but for those still having some old assets in Adobe Flash/SWF format or wanting to relive some old games/entertainment based in Flash, the open-source Ruffle project remains one of the leading contenders for dealing with Flash in 2024 and beyond. Ruffle is a Rust-based emulator for Adobe Flash that continues to be actively developed and supporting more features...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ruffle-Adobe-Flash-Player-2024

[mxan]

Ruffle's been around for ages, I'm surprised it's taken this long to report on it

[xcom]

Hello All,
Which software can you recommend to create such animations?

[spicfoo]

Ruffle's been around for ages, I'm surprised it's taken this long to report on it

It has been reported several times by Phoronix. You must have missed it.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ruffle-Adobe-Flash-Rust

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Adobe-Flash-Ruffle-2024

[ehansin]

I use this at work for a Flash-based teaching tool still being used. It was stand-alone for Windows and Mac. The Mac version was 32 bit only so no longer runs. I was able to extract the Flash content (cannot remember if extracted from the Windows or Mac version) and then created a way to play on 64 bit Macs using Ruffle. Good stuff! Flash may have gone away for anything new, but there is a lot of old content out there.

[juxuanu]

I've had it installed in both Android and Linux Firefox, and the occasional weird page still loads Flash correctly. No issues from my part.

[Mathias]

I sometimes like to play old flash games. All the old sites switched to ruffle. It usually works pretty well, but all the complaining we did about flash being slow.... ruffle is slower. On websites it usually runs compiled to webassembly. So I could understand that being slower. But the standalone isn't fast either - with a computer probably 10x faster compared to what I had a decade ago.

I'm thankful for ruffle anyway.

[monkeynut]

I sometimes like to play old flash games. All the old sites switched to ruffle. It usually works pretty well, but all the complaining we did about flash being slow.... ruffle is slower. On websites it usually runs compiled to webassembly. So I could understand that being slower. But the standalone isn't fast either - with a computer probably 10x faster compared to what I had a decade ago.

I'm thankful for ruffle anyway.

Gnash was the same, though. A particular build seemed to run D-Fence just fine, but if you ran it on a weedy PC the difference between that and Flash was obvious.

[Weasel]

I sometimes like to play old flash games. All the old sites switched to ruffle. It usually works pretty well, but all the complaining we did about flash being slow.... ruffle is slower. On websites it usually runs compiled to webassembly. So I could understand that being slower. But the standalone isn't fast either - with a computer probably 10x faster compared to what I had a decade ago.

I'm thankful for ruffle anyway.

What do you expect from Rust and its devs' rusted brain.

[ssokolow]

I sometimes like to play old flash games. All the old sites switched to ruffle. It usually works pretty well, but all the complaining we did about flash being slow.... ruffle is slower. On websites it usually runs compiled to webassembly. So I could understand that being slower. But the standalone isn't fast either - with a computer probably 10x faster compared to what I had a decade ago.

I'm thankful for ruffle anyway.

The announcement specifically says:

The priority for Ruffle has always been correctness above all else. We implement something, get it right, make tests, and then look at how to speed it up. Until recently, we've been firmly in the "get things working" stage. Well, if you look at our progress percentage above - I think you'll see that quite a lot of things work the way they're supposed to these days! That means it's time to visit all the pain points for performance, and oh boy there's been some huge improvements in this area.

@Lord-McSweeney and @adrian17 have implemented a verifier for AVM2, which lets us safely make assumptions about code and optimise based on those. This has unlocked adding an optimiser pass, which greatly speeds up ActionScript 3 content and removes a lot of overhead. It's still far from Flash Player speeds, but they have a JIT and had decades to make everything as fast as it was. We're getting there, though!

Basically, they readily admit they've been following "Make it work, make it right, make it fast" and they're only now starting to get to the point where they can dedicate more time to "make it fast".