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The Joy of Haxe

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Re: The Joy of Haxe

#31

Post by platz »

coldtea wrote: post #27
cryptica wrote: post #2

Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps. It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community. It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty p…

> Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. So like Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, ML and so on?

The first law of programming language intersectionality is that the interesting things will always be happening in languages other than the one you actually use.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#32

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

dyarosla wrote: post #26
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve only had the opposite experience. I worked on a team that inherited a large Haxe codebase for an online education tool, and we found Haxe to be exceedingly bad, even apart fron the nature of the code we inherited. We spent a lot of time porting most of it to a mix of Scala and Javascript. I still remember the daily emotional stress of working in Haxe. ... shudders

What was bad specifically? This comment reads more of a ‘the codebase we inherited sucked to rewrite’ than anything else.

Some things are generic critiques of haxe: standard library has poor documentation and big feature gaps, often important third party tools are basically abandoned, no support, generated code is extremely hard to debug or understand (both C++ and Javascript outputs for us).

Conditional compilation is a horrible, horrible idea period, and is particularly easy to turn into an indecipherable brittle mess in haxe. This was made worse by the previous authors of the code we inherited, but is really a case where it’s the tool’s (haxe’s) fault for implementing the feature in a way that makes it an intrinsic foot gun.

Lastly, it was a big turn off to our candidates, and many people we interviewed expressed lack of interest in working with it.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#33

Post by platz »

segmondy wrote: post #21
cryptica wrote: post #2

Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps. It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community. It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty p…

I really disliked Javascript and swore of it no matter how much it took over the world till typescript. If typescript is not enough, I'll use another language go/python and use web assembly to generate js. js is a byte code to me. However, the advantage of typescript is that I can pull in a js lib and use it.

I like typescript.

I also like purescript - which I like to think of as 'typescript, where the types have teeth' (I like that I can also pull in a js lib and use it)

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#34

Post by skybrian »

simion314 wrote: post #8
m_sahaf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-example: Dart. If corporate support is a definite factor, Dart would have taken off way earlier than now. A bigger factor in TypeScript's success would be the ability to gradually migrate the projects as it's a superset of JavaScript. How do you start migrating? Flip the file extensions from .js to .ts with loose compiler options, then gradually add typing as the options are tightened. It's factors like these…

Dart had some other downsides, like you needed Java I think and many developers have an irrational disgust for Java(I hope I remember right) There are other languages pushed by a big corporation that fail so having the big corporation is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

The syntax looks a bit like a cross between JavaScript and Java, but Dart isn't much at all like Java and doesn't depend on Java.

But you might be remembering the old Dart IDE, which was based on Eclipse.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#35

Post by jplayer01 »

cryptica wrote: post #2

Haxe is strange in that it seems to be very well known among developers but relatively very few actually use it. I guess it's an old project with very specific use cases; like building certain kinds of multi-platform apps. It's nice to see a project with such a dedicated community. It's a shame that most developers started using TypeScript instead of Haxe; that seems like a missed opportunity. TypeScript was pretty p…

I'd say one of the issues with Haxe was always tooling. I don't know how it is now, but when I was looking at it a few years ago, debugging it wasn't really possible.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#37

Post by simion314 »

skybrian wrote: post #34
simion314 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart had some other downsides, like you needed Java I think and many developers have an irrational disgust for Java(I hope I remember right) There are other languages pushed by a big corporation that fail so having the big corporation is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

The syntax looks a bit like a cross between JavaScript and Java, but Dart isn't much at all like Java and doesn't depend on Java. But you might be remembering the old Dart IDE, which was based on Eclipse.

I think I get confused, google had/has some transpilers/compiulers and other web tools that were based on Java and Java tooling.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#38

Post by m_sahaf »

simion314 wrote: post #37
skybrian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The syntax looks a bit like a cross between JavaScript and Java, but Dart isn't much at all like Java and doesn't depend on Java. But you might be remembering the old Dart IDE, which was based on Eclipse.

I think I get confused, google had/has some transpilers/compiulers and other web tools that were based on Java and Java tooling.

You were probably thinking of GWT and/or Closure-Compiler

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#39

Post by [deleted] »

simion314 wrote: post #37
skybrian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The syntax looks a bit like a cross between JavaScript and Java, but Dart isn't much at all like Java and doesn't depend on Java. But you might be remembering the old Dart IDE, which was based on Eclipse.

I think I get confused, google had/has some transpilers/compiulers and other web tools that were based on Java and Java tooling.

[deleted]

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#40

Post by giancarlostoro »

I want to love Haxe but tooling outside of Windows seems limited, although I havent looked at how good VS Code is with it yet, so maybe I'll look into that. Otherwise I am going to stick to D and Python.
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