Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#1

Post by mattkenefick » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

I remember tinkering with Haxe maybe around ~2010. I was surprised to see it's still around and getting regular updates.

I was (and still am, in some ways) against the idea of learning one language and trying to use it everywhere. But nowadays, there are so many transpilation and adapter systems going on that... everything is a bit fuzzy.

That made me remember Haxe. Their goal all along was to have one unified language to deploy anywhere.

Does anyone here use Haxe regularly? In production? I'd love to hear about your experiences and what you've used it in-place of.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#2

Post by CoastalCoder » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

https://haxe.org/

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#3

Post by bufferoverflow » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

It never gained significant popularity. If you want to learn a new language, choose something that is already popular and is gaining popularity. That would be Typescript or Rust at this moment.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#4

Post by larsiusprime » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

I use it in game development, it’s nice for those purposes.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#5

Post by nonbirithm » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:34 PM UTC

I used it in conjunction with OpenFL a few months ago to port a Flash project. My impression is Haxe itself is pretty solid as a language but I could only get the web-based target to work consistently. The C++ backend seems dead based on the repo activity[1] and I got GC-related crashes with no workaround. I could never get the native Android support working either since it crashed on startup.

Also OpenFL was missing some Flash features the project relied on and I had to spend a lot of time on a fork of their repos patching them in.

[1] https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/hxcpp/graphs/contributors

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#6

Post by lolinder » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #3

It never gained significant popularity. If you want to learn a new language, choose something that is already popular and is gaining popularity. That would be Typescript or Rust at this moment.

This is a complete non-answer. I'd assume that they know that Haxe isn't as popular as other languages, but they're asking about people's experience with Haxe, not looking for recommendations on which language to learn.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#7

Post by mmastrac » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

I used it a few years later for some work with Nickelodeon. Somewhere in a backup I have some Spongebob games and a version of Pai Sho.

Haxe was never great, but it was a bit more efficient and productive than using the GWT-based PlayN (formerly Fourplay). The language itself was just not quite right and felt like a harder version of Java or JavaScript.

It's not really a problem anymore, but compiling to ActuonScript used to be pretty buggy. Now that Flash is long dead, it's possible that the cross-compilation problems might be lessened.

They also may have added some additional features making it less painful, but I'm not convinced.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#8

Post by mmastrac » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:40 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #6

bufferoverflow wrote: post #3

It never gained significant popularity. If you want to learn a new language, choose something that is already popular and is gaining popularity. That would be Typescript or Rust at this moment.

This is a complete non-answer. I'd assume that they know that Haxe isn't as popular as other languages, but they're asking about people's experience with Haxe, not looking for recommendations on which language to learn.

I used Haxe in the past. While it isn't necessarily modern usage I'd agree with the parent comment and suggest either Rust (using the WASM target) or TypeScript.

Compiler ergonomics are important for me these days.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#9

Post by presbyterian » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:40 PM UTC

I’ve used it for game dev stuff with HaxeFlixel, but trying to do anything more than that ended up being a pain. The community around it seems to have mostly moved on: a lot of libraries are unsupported or haven’t been updated in years and there’s not a lot of places to find help when you run into problems. I really like Haxe as a language, but I really don’t see a bright future for it personally, especially with how popular TypeScript has become.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone here use Haxe?

#10

Post by mattkenefick » Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #6

bufferoverflow wrote: post #3

It never gained significant popularity. If you want to learn a new language, choose something that is already popular and is gaining popularity. That would be Typescript or Rust at this moment.

This is a complete non-answer. I'd assume that they know that Haxe isn't as popular as other languages, but they're asking about people's experience with Haxe, not looking for recommendations on which language to learn.

Correct