> .fla / XFL import — This is the one I’m most proud of. You can open your old Flash files. As far as I know, this is the only open-source tool that functions as a full authoring environment and can actually import .fla files. Not just play them back — edit them.
The backwards compatibility here is pretty clutch. I agree -- if he can build something that is compatible with old files AND pushes things forward for new, then this could do some really awesome stuff.
AFAIK the .fla format was never fully documented or reverse engineered by anyone (FFDEC has an exporter, but not importer), so this alone would be a bold claim.
https://ruffle.rs/ is pretty solid
I'm talking about the .fla (XFL) format, not .swf (which is documented well - though that doesn't mean its exact behavior its understood well)
(note: I'm one of Ruffle's maintainers)
ruffle is a player for the output format (swf), .fla is the authoring format
I'm very curious if the "ActionScript-to-C# transpiler" will actually work as well as he's hoping.
I'm cautiously optimistic that it could work.
It's been quite awhile since I've written ActionScript [1], but I remember when I wrote it I didn't write it significantly differently than C#. You still have similar Java-style OOP semantics with types that I think wouldn't be too hard to map into C#, especially if you're willing to be dirty and use reflection.
[1] Gah, has it really been almost fourteen years? Time is stupid.
It's a dialect (superset) of ECMAScript based on the never-released 4th edition draft, which was in development at the time C# was first released, so these similarities are no accident.