Still Have A Use For Adobe Flash? Ruffle Is Working To Safely Emulate It In Rust

While Adobe Flash is officially -- and thankfully -- dead, those interested in Adobe Flash Player for nostalgia or archival purposes, Ruffle is working to emulate Adobe Flash support via this open-source project making use of the Rust programming language.

Over the years there have been open-source projects like Gnash and Lightspark working to create a free software implementation of Adobe Flash. These projects had some mild success for their goals but never had a complete parity to the Adobe Flash Player prior to it being officially discontinued by Adobe in 2020. While the decline and death of Adobe Flash was widely celebrated, some are still interested in it and was surprised in hearing from a Phoronix reader with the Ruffle project working on a modern Rust-based emulator for Flash.

Ruffle is getting Adobe Flash content running safely in modern web browsers via Rust and WebAssembly.

Ruffle is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust and working on all major operating systems and via WebAssembly can also work in modern web browsers. Due to the memory safety guarantees of Rust, they believe this is a secure implementation of Flash. The goal is also to get all existing Flash content working with Ruffle.

This past week the Ruffle project issued their first progress report with getting dozens of ActionScript 2 based games working, progress on ActionScript 3, and improving Ruffle's support for mobile devices.

Those wanting to learn more about this modern Rust-based Flash Player emulator can do so at Ruffle.rs. The code to Ruffle is available under both an Apache 2.0 and MIT license and can be found on GitHub.