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Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

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Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#11

Post by cojo »

We used Haxe for a while at my last company for a cross-platform engine that would actually run well on web (browsers couldn't yet handle "real" Unity WebGL builds at that time).

While it "worked" and the resulting engine / suite of games ended up net profitable, and I'm a fan of Haxe's features as a language (I am really missing the pattern matching and macros in Typescript these days), I must say the build pipeline and available tools for OpenFL / Haxe games was lacking at best.

On the plus side being able to fork and fix issues we ran into was a game changer over Unity IMO.

Not sure if the ecosystem has evolved / improved on the build and tooling fronts in the last 18 months since I last interacted with it directly, but that would be the one word of caution I'd offer to anyone after they read this article. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get a little dirtier than usual if you really intend to ship on both web and mobile.

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#12

Post by xet7 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #3
thosakwe wrote: post #2

It might be time to try Haxe. I’ve always wondered why it doesn’t get a lot of buzz around it. It seems like a genuinely good way to achieve “write once, run anywhere.” It’s always interesting how the chicken-and-egg problem applies to programming languages.

Its a nice language though some of the output is weird. Like I did a PHP target as a test and I think I did a print statement and it added a lot of code in there when i was expecting a simple echo or something. So it can have its downsides depending on what you do. Definitely curious where it stands for Mobile though.

There has been a lot of progress to clean up target languages syntax, as can be seen from talk "Haxe 4.0" by Nicolas Cannasse: https://haxe.org/videos/conferences/haxe-summit-us-2018/

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#13

Post by kevin_bloch »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #3
thosakwe wrote: post #2

It might be time to try Haxe. I’ve always wondered why it doesn’t get a lot of buzz around it. It seems like a genuinely good way to achieve “write once, run anywhere.” It’s always interesting how the chicken-and-egg problem applies to programming languages.

Its a nice language though some of the output is weird. Like I did a PHP target as a test and I think I did a print statement and it added a lot of code in there when i was expecting a simple echo or something. So it can have its downsides depending on what you do. Definitely curious where it stands for Mobile though.

I wonder, did you have the "dead code elimination" feature enabled? (Just throwing it out there. I haven't tried transpiling to PHP with it myself. :) )

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#14

Post by kevin_bloch »

cojo wrote: post #11

We used Haxe for a while at my last company for a cross-platform engine that would actually run well on web (browsers couldn't yet handle "real" Unity WebGL builds at that time). While it "worked" and the resulting engine / suite of games ended up net profitable, and I'm a fan of Haxe's features as a language (I am really missing the pattern matching and macros in Typescript these days), I must say the build pipeline…

Not sure of the specifics in the last 18 months on straight OpenFL, but I know that some frameworks built on top of it had nice features like hot reloading. HaxeFlixel has an in-game debugger, too, for example. I guess it depends on the types of tooling you had in mind.

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#15

Post by larsiusprime »

cojo wrote: post #11

We used Haxe for a while at my last company for a cross-platform engine that would actually run well on web (browsers couldn't yet handle "real" Unity WebGL builds at that time). While it "worked" and the resulting engine / suite of games ended up net profitable, and I'm a fan of Haxe's features as a language (I am really missing the pattern matching and macros in Typescript these days), I must say the build pipeline…

OpenFL's matured a bit since then and I quite like it personally, though I should point out that OpenFL is simply one of many libraries, and the rest are worth checking out, too! OpenFL's probably the most well known but the ecosystem has a lot to offer beyond that.

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#16

Post by heckanoobs »

I used Haxe and NME years ago to build an Ouya (RIP) game. I was coming from actionscript and it was a delightful language. Glad to see it's still evolving. That game project was a blur of haxe, java, and c++ due to Ouya's infancy and haxe could handle it all. I was impressed

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#17

Post by k_ »

stewbrew wrote: post #7

Is haxe used for anything other than games? The userbase seems to have a focus on flash, games etc.

I've mostly used it for web (mainly react applications recently), for several companies.

The haxe->js community is growing these past years, but I still think Haxe isn't getting the love it deserves (compared to TypeScript, Flow typing for react, etc.)

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#19

Post by 52-6F-62 »

joneil wrote: post #8
stewbrew wrote: post #7

Is haxe used for anything other than games? The userbase seems to have a focus on flash, games etc.

I’ve used it for web (my failed startup was in Haxe, my side projects still are mostly Haxe). To be honest these days I mostly just use it as a “better JavaScript” because I’d prefer my backend to be NodeJS rather than PHP or Java or sone other Haxe target. But I really do prefer it to JavaScript, even with Babel and Flow and ES6 and all the things to modernise Js.

Curious— have you ever tried compiling to C++ or CS for the backend?

Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret

#20

Post by canada_dry »

Like I did a few years ago, I quickly browsed through some of the sites and didn't find solid quick start stuff needed to get me (a haxe noob) to go further.

For a 'mature' platform looking to get more attention I would have liked an easy step-by-step demo 'hello world' for a haxe -> android target.

But, I couldn't even find much in the way of haxe-for-dummies that specifically address the android target.

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