I'd like to chime in and add that I've had to rebuild an entire Visual Programming Language (think Scratch, but free of text) to migrate away from Flash.
I picked Haxe, and it has been a solid language+compiler for what I needed (transpile to JS, and now my code runs on any modern browser).
Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
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Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#32Is haxe used for anything other than games? The userbase seems to have a focus on flash, games etc.
Even if that is the case, I would argue it is already a success story, it doesn't need to be good at everything.
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#33The 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.
Written by a long-time OCaml developer, so not too surprising.
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#34Like 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.
I've deployed a HaxeFlixel project to Android, a couple years ago. I'll be sure to consider this angle for a follow-up piece. Thanks! :)
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#35Popular Ludum Dare contestant 01010111 has made some slick 48-hour games in Haxe.[1] Even winning the compo once too.
From what I've seen Haxe has a lot of great features for individual game developers to be expressive.
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#36Like 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.
I have the same problem! They have a manual and a cookbook, but nothing real entry stuff or something similiar like the Go Tour.
https://haxe.org/blog/haxe-online-training-courses-are-comin... <- this looked real promising not sure if they still gonna do it.
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#37I used Haxe years ago to make Flash games and tech demos [1] (probably only works with Chrome these days). At the time it was the only free way to create Flash games (at least using an actual programming language) but even when Adobe released some free tools, Haxe was still not only much faster as a compiler but it both produced faster code and provided tools for making things fast (e.g. `inline` wasn't just a hint, if the compiler couldn't inline a function it would error out - and inlining made a difference at the time).
Eventually i lost interest in Flash and moved on to other things. I thought about using Haxe for making HTML5 games (when those were new), but unlike Flash gaming that was huge, HTML5 gaming never took off and was almost entirely about mobile games that i never cared much about. Also Haxe's JavaScript output at the time had some significant overhead that i found it simpler to just write JS directly.
I've been subscribed to the Haxe mailing list for the last 10 or so years, mainly to take a peek at what is going on and sometimes try a new version (sadly it seems Haxe is sometimes breaking backwards compatibility and often found the code needing changes), but that ended recently with the mailing list shutting down. Since then i had no other contact with the language at all.
Although sometimes i see people writing "one-to-many" transpilers, thinking that this is a neat new idea, while i'm in my corner muttering something along the lines "Haxe did that a decade ago" :-P.
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#38I used Haxe years ago to make Flash games and tech demos [1] (probably only works with Chrome these days). At the time it was the only free way to create Flash games (at least using an actual programming language) but even when Adobe released some free tools, Haxe was still not only much faster as a compiler but it both produced faster code and provided tools for making things fast (e.g. `inline` wasn't just a hint,…
The mailing list has been decommissioned in favor of the Haxe community site : https://community.haxe.org/
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#39It 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
Single-big company control/backing is not sufficient (Dart) nor historically necessary (Python, Perl, Scala, Ruby, PHP, Lua, JS).
I'd agree though that it's a huge marketing win.
Re: Haxe: Cross-Platform Development's Best-Kept Secret
#40Like 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.
That's a bit like saying that C++ isn't multi-platform because Visual Studio is Windows-only.