The imminent demise of Abobe’s Flash Player, once the standard for displaying rich media in a browser, has inspired a project dubbed Ruffle, to preserve the legacy of Flash. Ruffle uses the Rust language and the WebAssembly binary format.
Still in a proof-of-concept development phase, the open source Ruffle is a Flash player written in Rust. Intended to keep Flash content accessible, the project targets the desktop and web using WebAssembly. A demo of Ruffle is available now.
By being programmed in Rust, Ruffle can compile to WebAssembly, which the Ruffle team hopes will allow playback of Flash movies at full speed. And WebAssembly’s running in a sandboxed environment can help prevent security vulnerabilities, such as the ones that have plagued the original Flash Player.
Web APIs would provide for accurate emulation of most SWF content. Ruffle could support multiple rendering backends, such as GPU rendering via tessellation using the Lyon library or by web canvas APIs.
Where to download Ruffle
You can download Ruffle from GitHub.