It's a very cool project I've thought about gettinng involved with. My company has a number of complex flash games that will not initialize in shumway, but for toys and small apps it works about half the time -- and that's cool! So far, when it works, performance is about 3x slower.
This was discussed on HN a few weeks ago:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6481319" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6481319</a>
Fun fact: Shumway, was originally based on similar software called Gordon... And who is Gordon Shumway? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALF_(TV_series)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALF_(TV_series)</a>
Could someone help me understand the logic behind this project?<p>Actionscript runs in a VM, that's native code. It seems like Mozilla's argument is that the AS VM is buggy and, thus, is/was/could be exploited often, so it's a security liability.<p>Their solution to this problem (as far as I understood) is to interprete the SWF bytecode using JavaScript/HTML5, because JavaScript runs in a sandbox.<p>Isn't anyone concerned that this is not the best solution to the problem? What's the difference between bugs in the AS VM and bugs in the JS VM? The JS VM is native code too, I don't see anyone rushing to replace it.<p>If the JS VM is more mature, then this is just a matter of getting the AS VM to that maturity level. If someone wrote clang while gcc existed for many years, why can't Mozilla focus their efforts on writing a better AS VM, instead of writing an emulation layer?<p>Given that both AS and JS are ECMAScripts, why can't AS be compiled in a way that allows it to run on the JS VMs?<p>If the bytecode generated by the AS compiler doesn't match what a JS VM can execute, then, since the AS bytecode will necessarily mimic features available in the language (and the languages are similar), why can't we translate the AS bytecode into JS bytecode?
I'm in favour as long as there is a reliable way of turning these things off.<p>The biggest advantage of Flash is that Flashblock fairly reliably turns it off, so that ads that use Flash for animation don't get a chance to run.<p>In the absence of Flash, I worry about gobs of marketing JS animating pages with fewer generic ways of turning them off.