Ask HN: Why Adobe still can’t figure out Flash on WASM?
I&#x27;m trying to figure out what you&#x27;re arguing for. A) Exporting legacy Flash apps from 15 years ago to WASM; B) Relaunching Flash as an active development platform on top of WASM.<p>If it&#x27;s A, then there&#x27;s no money in it. There might be some nostalgia in resurrecting old Flash apps, but it just isn&#x27;t worth Adobe putting in all that work.<p>If it&#x27;s B, I think there&#x27;s a host of issues to relaunching Flash as an active development platform.<p>First, I think the biggest thing is that the development community likely wouldn&#x27;t want to buy into a proprietary system again. Yes, it would compile to WASM, but you&#x27;d be on the hook to Adobe for the future of whatever you were building. That might have been ok back when there weren&#x27;t other options to create that type of media. I don&#x27;t think you could get enough buy-in today.<p>Second, WASM isn&#x27;t just perfect. I&#x27;m very bullish on WASM&#x27;s future, but to pick on one example: it doesn&#x27;t have a garbage collector. That means that any runtime that needs GC needs to ship its own GC. Instead of a lightweight JS payload, people have to download your garbage collector in addition to the code. Likewise, many languages often come with standard libraries so you&#x27;re shipping your implementation for `List`, `Set`, etc. along with the code of the actual application. With JS, the browser already has the built-ins.<p>Microsoft has been putting a lot of effort into Blazor on WASM (allowing developers to write C# with Razor templates that execute in the browser to compete against things like React). It&#x27;s been a pretty big effort and as of .NET 6 it&#x27;s still around half the speed of React+Redux. Worse, its startup time is 3-6x worse depending on whether you&#x27;re using AOT compilation or not. Ahead of time compilation helps it run faster, but it also means having to download a lot more. Even without AOT, Blazor could weigh in close to 10x React+Redux.<p>Again, I&#x27;m very bullish about WASM&#x27;s future. .NET 7 (releasing in a month or two) should have nice improvements for Blazor. However, it&#x27;s not easy to simply target WASM if you&#x27;re looking to create a platform that people are wanting to actively use. I think that Blazor is going to be a wonderful long-term investment for Microsoft. WASM is looking to add GC capabilities so that languages don&#x27;t have to ship it. Languages are getting better at figuring out which pieces of code are actually being used and need to be shipped.<p>However, does Adobe want to put all that money and effort in when it seems like the industry won&#x27;t be beholden to a proprietary standard in the future? Probably not.<p>I think the big issue is that there&#x27;s a large gulf between &quot;this works&quot; and &quot;this is performant and efficient enough to compete with alternatives.&quot; Again, I think WASM is an excellent long-term investment for the web. If WASM had started in 2000 or 2005, we probably wouldn&#x27;t have seen such amazing work on JS engines like V8. However, WASM needs to compete against incredibly advanced JS engines that are at the top of their game. It will happen and I think it&#x27;s already great for languages like Rust and C. I just think that it wouldn&#x27;t be trivial for Adobe to relaunch Flash as an active development platform.<p>Adobe wouldn&#x27;t just need something that worked, but something that&#x27;s a compelling alternative to modern development. Flash pre-dates jQuery by a decade. In the &#x27;90s and early 2000s, Macromedia and Adobe were offering an interactive, rich-media system that pre-dated anyone really using Ajax. I&#x27;m not saying Flash offers nothing today. I never developed for Flash so maybe it was a nice development environment. However, we&#x27;re able to make the same rich, interactive experiences without Flash today.<p>Finally, on a legal level, it looks like Adobe may have licensed Flash to Harman&#x2F;Samsung: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;services.harman.com&#x2F;partners&#x2F;adobe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;services.harman.com&#x2F;partners&#x2F;adobe</a>. Maybe that doesn&#x27;t preclude Adobe from resuming Flash development in the future, but maybe it does.