Stuff like this makes me wish Adobe had just open-sourced Flash. I hope this doesn't start a flame war, but I think that most of the crap that Flash gets stems from the fact that it's a proprietary plugin...if Adobe releases part-of or all of the source code, we conceivably could avoid losing history, and someone could write something that compiles to WebAssembly or something.
I remember when Shumway was announced a few years ago, and I was excited that this might be the solution that everyone asked for, but I suspect the problem was a lot harder to solve than most people thought it would be (unsurprising...Flash has 20+ years of baggage in its codebase, who knows how many weird hacks have piled up).
I was at Adobe in those days and the Flash PMs I worked with would have absolutely loved to open source the player. AFAIK the problem is large amounts of licensed third-party code throughout the codebase.
I'm hoping Adobe eventually goes the open source direction. I don't think there is much to lose at this point. As you mentioned, for historical purposes, it would nice to have a working archive of popular flash games and famous/infamous website flash splash screens and pre-loaders.
What was the process of reverse-engineering something like Flash? Did you simply do it by looking at the bytecode (or whatever it's called in Flash), or did you write something with the mainline compiler and work from there?
The bytecode for AVM2 is fairly well documented, and there is a test suite that you can compare against. We reached 99% compatibility with that, and were at times much faster than the Flash VM (simply benefiting from years of investment in JS engines).
The hard part was understanding what the Flash player was doing, and the differences between all the different Flash Player and SWF File Format versions. Not to mention, re-implementing the rendering engine and the entire API surface of Flash, which was HUGE. We basically took existing content and tried to make sure Shumway did the same thing the Flash player did, wrote a regression test and repeated the process.
To this day, I still don't understand exactly how the timeline worked (or was supposed to work). It's like a web page DOM, but you can jump back and forth in the timeline, it's wild.
We certainly learned a lot working on Shumway. Firefox got a lot better, we stressed the JS engine and the graphics stack quite a bit, and had to make improvements all throughout the codebase to make Shumway possible.
In a lot of ways, Flash was great. Its rendering engine was (and still is) quite impressive, and nothing has really replaced it yet.
I feel the same way. Flash got so much crap from people, and a lot of it was deserved, no question, but people go so onboard with the "KILL ALL FLASH" bandwagon that they sort of forgot to replace it completely.
Video streaming with HLS isn't horrible, but it was so much easier (in my opinion) to do Flash with RTMP.
I agree, there is a lot of content tied up in Flash, and while some of it will never be possible without plugins or something of equivalent power (due to a requirement for direct network access/udp), the vast majority of historically important Flash content could be packaged with an in-browser runtime.
I remember when Shumway was announced a few years ago, and I was excited that this might be the solution that everyone asked for, but I suspect the problem was a lot harder to solve than most people thought it would be (unsurprising...Flash has 20+ years of baggage in its codebase, who knows how many weird hacks have piled up).