Re:Ask HN: Why Adobe still can’t figure out Flash on WASM?
by titzer on Monday September 19, 2022 @11:43AM
(#32899883)
I've heard similar anecdotes about the VM being a mess.
Where Adobe seems to have royally screwed up is creating an unambiguous specification for SWF format, and also disallowing other implementations of SWF. Instead, they become beholden to a codebase that no one could make heads or tails of, with no way of creating a clean rewrite that was guaranteed to replicate the behavior.
In designing Wasm we were very conscious of this, which is why Wasm has a very, very explicit specification that is simple with only the minimum non-determinism (some NaN issues) and no UB.
Where Adobe seems to have royally screwed up is creating an unambiguous specification for SWF format, and also disallowing other implementations of SWF. Instead, they become beholden to a codebase that no one could make heads or tails of, with no way of creating a clean rewrite that was guaranteed to replicate the behavior.
In designing Wasm we were very conscious of this, which is why Wasm has a very, very explicit specification that is simple with only the minimum non-determinism (some NaN issues) and no UB.