Live data from Hacker News

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

toptal.com

21–30 of 42 posts

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

#22
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…

> I must say the build pipeline and available tools for OpenFL / Haxe games was lacking at best

That was my experience as well.

Too many moving pieces going in different directions. When it wasn't a Lime issue, it was Hxcpp, or OpenFL, or a combination of these. That was 3-4 years ago though.

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

#24

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.

Oh, but, if you have wine or some virtualization software you can run quickly get started using 'haxedevelop'...

I guess it's not that multi-platform, after all.

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

#25
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.

Languages without a big tech company behind do not get popular, all the popular new languages ahve big companies behind Rust,Go,TypeScript

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

#26

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.

Oh, but, if you have wine or some virtualization software you can run quickly get started using 'haxedevelop'... I guess it's not that multi-platform, after all.

Sure, or vscode, vim, IntelliJ, sublime. There are a ton of options.

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

#28

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.

Haxe doesn't quite operate at that level, it's more compiler than build tool. You'd use Haxe to compile to Java or C++, but you'd use a framework such as OpenFL, which provides its own build toolchain, to actually build an Android app via Haxe.

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

#29
post #4

The biggest thing that interests me about Haxe is it is rare to find a high-level language with a sophisticated static type system and familiar syntax. This is why TypeScript is so much beloved, but Haxe has some awesome features TypeScript lacks, like a pattern-matching switch statement (with guards), and array comprehensions.

I couldn't agree with you more. The pattern-matching in Haxe has really helped keep my code more readable.

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

#30
post #8
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.

Same here. It's a "better Javascript" for me as well. My constraints force me to use JS for what I'm building, and Haxe does a great job of insulating me from having to write and maintain a large codebase in JS.
Post reply on HN