

Lightspark: LLVM-based Flash Player for Linux - mmc
http://lightspark.sourceforge.net/

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mambodog
When (I'm hoping it's 'when') this becomes stable I'm thinking a Mac port of
this would make a lot of people happy. Despite Steve's fighting words I think
most Mac users out there would prefer not to be second-class citizens on the
web, and this could be a big step in that direction.

PS. Apologies for stealing your thunder there, Linux people, I just see the
average Mac user wanting [a decent flash player] more than the average Linux
user.

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someone_here
Linux users do have a decent flash player. We have hardware acceleration!
Apple only recently released the required video API for the flash player.

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pmjordan
So far, my impression was that the problem with building a Flash
implementation isn't so much the language runtime as everything else -
rendering, video, audio, input, etc. Isn't Tamarin [1] enough to run
ActionScript 3?

FWIW, I realise that this has an advanced implementation of some graphical
features and I'm not trying to belittle it, it seems an impressive effort. I'm
just curious what's currently holding back a full implementation.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(JavaScript_engine)>

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someone_here
Tamarin _is_ what runs AS3 in the Adobe Flash Player.

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pmjordan
Exactly. And it's open source. So my question is: why re-invent that part? The
other bits seem more pressing for practical use, even if Tamarin isn't as fast
as it could be or whatever.

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GrandMasterBirt
Who knows, what about V8? Maybe V8 is better, on that note would be
interesting if browsers exposed their JS engine to Flash so that any browser
improvements to javascript would also improve flash performance, instead of
duplicating effort and having adobe do crap with actionscript it all just runs
on one engine and vuala.

Pipe dream or reality?

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naner
<http://allievi.sssup.it/techblog/?p=260>

Has a little more info

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orblivion
So does this read actionscript, or straight from the .swf?

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trun
Reads the bytecode straight from the swf. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks
to be a lot further along than Gnash was.

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jomohke
The two projects appear to have implemented different parts of flash. Flash
has several separate virtual machines, which have been introduced over the
years with new versions of flash.

Lightspark only implements the newer ActionScript3 runtime, from Flash 9 (and
newer), while Gnash only (?) implements some of the earlier runtimes.

Currently Lightspark can only run the newer HD youtube player (which is
compiled against flash 9), and Gnash can only run the older player (Which I
think is still used for VP6 videos)

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ed
Just to clarify, the flash runtime only has two actionscript virtual machines:
AVM and AVM2. AVM2 was a complete rewrite for actionscript 3 (AS3) and was
introduced for Flash 9. The original AVM supports Flash 8 and below (AS1 and
AS2).

Gnash never got around to supporting AVM2 (it's not at all trivial), which is
why Lightspark is significant. That, along with better hardware acceleration
which might actually help it outperform the official player!

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cookiecaper
Tried to install a couple of days ago; it builds with tweaks but crashes on my
up-to-date Arch Linux install.

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perpetuity
I don't desire flash so much that this matters.

