Lightspark Flash player goes beta

[Posted May 18, 2010 by corbet]

Responding to the acute lack of beta-quality free Flash players, the Lightspark developers have announced a beta release. "Mostly complete support for the newer version of the flash scripting language: ActionScript 3.0, introduced with Flash 9. Both an interpreter and a JIT engine based on LLVM are provided. The previous versions of the language (supported by Gnash, which does not support 3.0) run on a completely different, and quite weird, virtual machine."

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 18, 2010 18:18 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

So now there are three (swfdec, Gnash, Lightspark).

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 18, 2010 18:51 UTC (Tue) by svena (guest, #20177) [Link]

Not really, development of swfdec stopped quite a while ago.

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 18, 2010 20:30 UTC (Tue) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link] (7 responses)

I know the author wrote a thesis about his LLVM-based AS3 JIT compiler, but if one is creating an open-source alternative to Flash, why not use Flash's own open-source Tamarin VM?

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 18, 2010 21:27 UTC (Tue) by wmf (guest, #33791) [Link]

That would be too easy; then they might stand a chance of catching up with Flash Player.

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 18, 2010 22:30 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (5 responses)

And with the head start in using the Flash VM you get all the bugs and security vulnerabilities. Those are two very good reasons to rewrite the VM.

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 18, 2010 23:32 UTC (Tue) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link] (4 responses)

>And with the head start in using the Flash VM you get all the
>bugs and security vulnerabilities. Those are two very good reasons
>to rewrite the VM.

Yeah, but then you'll have to do all the hard work of putting them back in later!

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 19, 2010 8:56 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

The correct response to anyone asking for the vulns to be introduced is "Show me a real piece of Flash with actual utility for real people (games, geek toys, and your pet proof-of-concept project don't count) that requires this vulnerability to be open, and I'll go chargrill the idiotic authors for you."

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 19, 2010 10:00 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

It was only a joke :-(

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 19, 2010 10:08 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>games, geek toys, and your pet proof-of-concept project don't count

You just described every use of Flash except Youtube. If you're happy with a version of Flash that can't do those things then clearly you don't need Flash and are hence not its target audience.

Lightspark Flash player goes beta

Posted May 19, 2010 18:29 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

"You just described every use of Flash except Youtube"

There are a relatively large number of mostly internal business applications deployed using Flash these days, largely developed using Flex development environment. For quasi client server applications, especially on a fast network, Flex works very well. Certainly a lot better than plain old javascript.

Intuit has been deploying third party Flex apps in a software as a service manner in their new Intuit Workplace relatively recently as well.