Re: [Gnash-dev] future direction

[Rob Savoye]

On 08/20/10 17:52, dww wrote:

> Has it been decided yet if within the Gnash project, Lightspark will be
> used for AVM2 content sites and Gnash for AVM1? 

  It's not decided, as nobody has had the time to research the idea some
more. Tamarin may also be an option, but we need to make an educated
decision on it after some studying both. I assume that's potentially a
few weeks of work, as one has to actually write some prototype code to
experiment. So obviously, there is still work to do.

  One Lightspark problem (other than all the dependencies) is that the
entire VM lives in the plugin, and as it reads the SWF version from the
file, it can easily fire up the standalone Gnash like our plugin does.

  Since our plugin does just use the standalone Gnash, this would be
more difficult. It's probably be easier to integrate the scriptable
plugin and ExternalInterface work I recently added to the our plugin to
the Lightspark one, maybe sharing a unified plugin for both projects.

> If yes, will improvements to Lightspark become the main area of development 
> effort
> and Gnash go into more of a maintenance mode?

  No. People seem to think flash is only used for streaming video
sharing sites, but believe it or not, that is not main use of flash.
There is a huge amount of educational flash content out there, as
teachers like the creation environment. If you search around the net,
I'd bet you'd find more animated flash files in the older formats, than
all the current content in AVM2. That may change over time, but there
are still things Gnash doesn't handle correctly even for the older
formats that should be fixed. Fixing some are big tasks, so there is
plenty to do.

  The other thing is there is still a lot that can be done to make Gnash
a higher performance player, that runs on more platforms than anything
Adobe ever wrote. Better rendering, less memory footprint, lower cpu
loads, hardware accelerated support, etc... are all still big projects.

  Although I think the Lightspark project is fine, I have no interest in
being a Lightspark developer, I'm currently still busy with Gnash, and
have things I still plan to do with it. :-)

        - rob -