Re:Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023
by grishka on Friday April 21, 2023 @11:17AM
(#35655045)
The vulnerabilities in Flash were not in the SWF format or the AS APIs or their intended behavior. That was all rock-solid. They were in one particular proprietary implementation of Flash player. Ruffle won't have any memory-related vulnerabilities to begin with by virtue of being written in a memory-safe language.
Re:Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023
by camhenlin on Saturday April 22, 2023 @01:11AM
(#35663550)
My first job was writing VBA programs on top of extremely complicated Excel 97 spreadsheets to prevent input errors and provide a cleaner UI. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve ever been as productive as I was at that job. It was just so straightforward to crank out decent looking forms and so intuitive for a fresh new dev
OK, now that we've all calmed back down, VB6 has been unmatched in the way that it allowed someone with zero experience to drag-and-drop and write in what looks like pseudocode to get some little business widget built. Yes, you can engineer something with better architecture that's less likely to paint you into a `DoEvents()` corner. Yes, the mere existence of settings like `On Error Resume Next`, `Option Strict Off`, and `Option Explicit Off` are anathema to correctness, security (lol), and robustness. No, if you expect support for Unicode or 64-bit operations, it wasn't built for that.
Many people loathe Flash for its security vulnerabilities, or VB6 because of experiences with poorly-written code at businesses that should have had a 'real programmer.' And today, a tool that made the same design decisions that Flash and VB6 did - pandering to novices who weren't willing to go to the effort to do things right - would be derided as a toy, as unusable for real work outside of sandboxed demos. But both were instrumental as stepping stones in the early 2000s to transform non-computer-literate individuals and businesses into creators and users.