Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub:
Even YouTube must continue to support Flash video for at least another year because many websites embedded Flash videos using YouTube's boilerplate embedding HTML with the Flash <object> tag. Google can't magically rewrite these third-party websites' HTML. :) Maybe YouTube can use some SWF that loads or redirects people to youtube.com? Or browsers could recognize YouTube's boilerplate embedding HTML and rewrite it with YouTube's HTML5 video.
I'm on a friends tablet now, but I'm looking forward to digging through the implementation later. Keep up the good work!
P.s.: Did you find parts of AS3 beautiful? :-)
In Shumway, we do almost all rendering in a Canvas element, so we haven't experimented all that much with DOM-heavy constructs.
As for your last question: I used to work with AS3 on a daily basis in a previous work-life, so I have extensive experience with it. Yes, there are some parts of the language that're very nice. I think that optional static typing is the best of all worlds, for example. The details of AS3's type system leave much to be desired, but the IDE support gained through static typing and the large set of bugs that're far easier to avoid are easily worth it.
Also, declarative classes are, in my opinion much easier to deal with than, e.g., the unstructured alternatives in JS. That's part of why we moved to TypeScript, and I'd argue that it vastly improved the quality of our codebase. I'm very much looking forward to classes in ES6.
Of course there are things that I don't miss about AS3 and regret having to deal with in Shumway. Namespaces are one, E4X the other. Both are good concepts in theory but hugely problematic in practice because of issues in the details.
That's not a portmanteau though is it? I thought a that was when you joined two words, eg hungry + angry = hangry. Maybe portmanteau has different variations that I'm unaware of - though I know I probably just sound like a pedant.
That is very cool, if so.
If so, is it possible to use UDP over shumway?
https://github.com/yurydelendik/rtmp.js
AFAIK, Shumway does not support UDP sockets, but, as a Firefox extension, it could access Gecko XPCOM APIs that are not available to JS on the web.
>Shumway needs H.264 video decoders that may not be available on Windows XP or Linux.
Is that a reason for Linux users to be annoyed, or just something that happened and will be corrected soon?
EDIT: It looks like Linux support shipped in FF26 as long as GStreamer supports it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=794282#c101
Windows XP is still left out – they use DirectShow for MP3 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=861693) but using it for H.264 would require a licensed plugin which few people have and while OpenH.264 is available, it doesn't support the Main & High profiles used for most video on the web (it's been focused on streaming): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=799318#c57
What would be required in order to get Shumway to actually play video from PIV (instead of Amazon simply demanding that the user installs Flash or Silverlight)?
What's the easiest way to test shumway on arbitrary files? I'm running the latest nightly, but the amazon videos still use flash (tested by checking the right click menu). I've tried the extension in the past, but it never seemed to do anything.
Also, it would be nice if there was, say, a table of common flash APIs coloured by implementation status, for easy tracking of shumway completeness.
There are two easy ways to test Shumway on all SWF files: if you don't want to use Firefox Nightly, you can just install the extension from http://areweflashyet.com/ and should be all set. If you're using Firefox Nightly, you can simply visit about:config and change the shumway.swf.whitelist setting to "*". Note that you still need to have the Flash plugin installed for most sites to work, as I explained in another comment a few minutes ago.
Regarding the table of supported APIs: the problem with that is that we actually have most APIs implemented, but have compatibility bugs in some of them which break content. If we could easily list the broken APIs, then in most cases we could just as easily fix them. That said, there are some major API areas we don't yet support. Those are mostly related to newer and thus less-used capabilities, such as Flash's version of WebGL, called Stage3D, and a new text layout system called Text Layout Engine.
I'm guessing that lightspark must already have some tests, and from your side there are probably some they could use too ?
You can try Shumway in other browsers without the extension at the project website:
http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/
The SpiderMonkey team's "Are We Fast Yet?" website also includes some AS3 benchmarks running in Shumway on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari:
http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=shu...
Edit: I should add in, the player is primarily Javascript with a small rendering engine for Flash fallback. Even in the Flash case, everything is controlled via JS through a flash bridge. We prioritize HTML5 video when possible across browsers and devices.
Our team was uncertain how to reach at Amazon to get your blessing. :) If you (or Amazon management :) have any problems or concerns, please feel free to email me at cpeterson at mozilla dot com!
re HTML5 video: do you use it on desktop browsers? Mozilla is working hard to improve our HTML5 video implementation. Can we opt in Firefox for HTML5 video? Playing Flash videos in Shumway is just a stepping stone on the path to HTML5 video.
We feature detect everything but have been prioritizing Flash at the moment due to issues with Chrome and HTML5 video.
What versions of SWF does Shumway aim to support? 7, 8, 9, 10, all of the above?
How does Shumway interact with click-to-play and similar mechanisms to stop unwanted Flash objects from playing? Does it have that functionality built-in?
Shumway does not currently support click-to-play because it is not a real browser plugin. It hooks into Firefox's click-to-play mechanism to conditionally override the Flash plugin. This is a hack and will soon be replaced with "jsplugins", a Firefox feature that will allow browser plugins to be written in JS and run in an out-of-process sandbox:
From the discussion on HN, it sounds like Shumway aims to be a drop in replacement for Adobe's Flash plugin.
If you use Shumway, though, don't forget to disable Adobe's Flash (I've found that having it enabled and Shumway installed results in rather brutal crashes).
https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/blob/master/src/avm2/comp...
I've worked a lot with Flash bytecode and contributed to Shumway a long time ago, so if you have any more questions, let me know!
RABCDAsm author here. Curious about the same, I've always thought the project might be useful to VM implementers. Also wondering if you've had trouble with obfuscators that employ control flow obfuscation, and create unreachable basic blocks with junk code.
Shumway falls back on an interpreter if the control flow is not reducible.
We feature detect flash via the navigator.plugins object and from that thread it doesn't look like shumway is listed there.
(I'm a dev on that player)
Somewhat absurdly, you currently need Flash to use Flash without Flash in many cases. We don't yet have support for installing Shumway in navigator.plugins, so sites that detect Flash using that (i.e., most of them) currently only work in Shumway if Flash is installed, too.
This will be fixed once https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 lands.
It would NEVER be safe to Ctrl+V again!
In fact, requiring a plugin for this functionality only serves to increase the attack surface for the browser as a platform.
GitHub's "copy repo URL to clipboard" button uses Flash to write to the clipboard. Shumway has implemented Flash's clipboard APIs (which it can do because it can access Gecko XPCOM APIs as a Firefox extension), but they are currently disabled because Shumway hasn't implemented the "in response to user click" bit yet.
Today I learned that Firefox still supports Windows XP.
I've even seen myself a Windows XP with Firefox installed in a shop just a few days ago.
