This is not an official Adobe answer as I am not and have never been on the player team, plus Adobe has a policy of not releasing staffing numbers. Nick may have been right at one point in time when there was no Adobe AIR and the Player only had to work on Mac and Windows without GPUs, but OTOH, I am pretty sure that re-creating the Adobe runtimes from scratch today would be a significant effort as the number of devices, operating system versions, GPUs and other platform differences would make hardware abstraction a huge task. IMO, that was a goal of the Open Screen Project: to get the hardware and os vendors to take on the abstraction load. And I believe there are still terms-of-use issues around interpreting byte code on some of these platforms.
On 1/20/15, 4:38 AM, "Nicholas Kwiatkowski" <nicho...@spoon.as> wrote: >On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:37 AM, Stephane Beladaci < >adobeflexengin...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> Meantime, do someone know >> >> 1/ how many developers were working on the Flash player at the peak of >>the >> engineering team in term of size? In other words, what was the maximum >> number of tech workers working on the Flash player runtime as any point >>in >> time? All included (engineering, developer, QA ...). >> >> >The Flash Player team consisted of at most a dozen developers + Q/A + PMs, >etc. over the years. Mind you the Flash Player has been a project that >has >been on-going since the mid nineties. That does not include all the IP >they bought, including the IP for video decoding, DRM, etc. which is where >the Flash Player still shines. Many of us don't know for sure, but >outside >estimates put about 30% of the FP codebase as licensed or purchased IP. > > >> 2/ How was the development effort divided and distributed? >> > >The FP team primarily consisted of a team in the old Macromedia office in >San Francisco. They would be assigned a bug or feature and work on it >until it was delivered, like most other projects. Back in the early days >there was the big notion to keep the compiled downloadable FP very small >(remember, a majority of the installs were done by people on modems until >the early 2000's). If I remember right, they quoted a download of no more >than 1MB in order to install and run. That inflated quite a bit in the >late 2000's as they started including some of the new video functions in >MovieStar.
