Targeting Flash (in fact Ruffle) for new code in 2025

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How far back in time do I need to drive my DeLorean to develop (green fields code) for Flash/Ruffle in Haxe?

I don’t have much Haxe ecosystem experience so an answer like “I would do this, with these ingredients (libs)” would be great.

Maybe a good answer is: "Don’t even try. Just use the Flash tools. As and when you move on to Haxe, you can and translate the AS3 and thank me for telling you to use these old libraries [x,y,z] because they will exist on Haxe ‘in the distant future of 2025+’ " ??

My understanding is:
Flash iself is now in Haxe’s rear view mirror.
The Flash Force is still strong in Haxe, but in an Obi-Wan kind of way.
I will presumably have to dig out an old Haxe compiler and old versions of current libs.

-— “Why? In God’s name why man?” ----
I want to show Ruffle some love -as a living platform (vs a way to get ancient content running).
I want to deploy swf to archive.org
Ruffle is the future of the browser platform. No really. I had a vision and everything.

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Haxe’s as3 target was removed a long time ago, but the direct swf bytecode target still exists and is still usable in stable and nightly versions of Haxe.

OpenFL still works with the flash target and is used regularly by its maintainers for comparing behaviour. Presumably, libraries built on top of OpenFL should still work too.

So you can still definitely generate swf files using Haxe, and they should hopefully run with ruffle. For some reason the haxe unit tests still don’t pass when running on ruffle, but it should improve as ruffle expands support for more obscure parts of the api.

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thanks tobil4sk -and good news for me!

>>OpenFL still works with the flash target and is used regularly by its maintainers for comparing behaviour.<<

Interesting. I had got the idea that OpenFL was strictly an alternate implementation of the upper layers of Flash, and wouldn’t get compiled into a swf. It sounds like it is more than that?

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Yes, OpenFl reimplements the Flash API. If you want to target something other than flash, you can still write against the flash API with -lib openfl and then the flash types are remapped onto the OpenFL implementation: openfl/lib/flash-externs/src/flash/display/Sprite.hx at develop · openfl/openfl · GitHub

That or you write against the OpenFL API and when you compile to flash, it uses the flash API directly: openfl/src/openfl/display/Sprite.hx at develop · openfl/openfl · GitHub

FWIW there’s also a more lightweight fork that is for the browser only: GitHub - innogames/openfl: The "Open Flash Library" for fast 2D development … it doesn’t have all this remapping, but the Haxe compiler specifically has the --remap argument if you want to map flash API to openfl API or the converse.

Best,
Juraj

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Back when Flash was only starting to sunset I created an OpenFL project which compiled to both HTML5 and SWF. It worked very well. Now I use OpenFL primarily with HTML5 and a little Hashlink.