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The Joy of Haxe

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Re: The Joy of Haxe

#51

Post by UncleEntity »

hzhou321 wrote: post #50
dyarosla wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to hear more. What’s missing from the std features? Where are the docs lacking? I will agree to your point about abandoned third party tools but that happens with any language? It’s just more pronounced on a less popular one. I will also agree about the code it produces: the point of a transpiled language isn’t for its output to necessarily be readable but first and foremost fast. You wouldnt expect c to pro…

> the point of a transpiled language isn’t for its output to necessarily be readable but first and foremost fast. You wouldnt expect c to produce understandable assembly in all cases, would you? I would like to argue about this philosophy. When your target output is not readable, then you restrict the developer to work inside your upper-level language. This is fine if your upper layer is robust and transparent enough…

One could reasonably use llvm for the backend (assuming cough> they had an actual reference grammar for the languagecough>) and then you'd have the same problem, the output would just be some unreadable intermediate language that is far from transparent to the average user.

The manual doesn't really go into enough detail to imply you'd need to fiddle with the outputted code but I'd imagine any case would be a bug rather than a feature.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#52

Post by dyarosla »

hzhou321 wrote: post #50
dyarosla wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to hear more. What’s missing from the std features? Where are the docs lacking? I will agree to your point about abandoned third party tools but that happens with any language? It’s just more pronounced on a less popular one. I will also agree about the code it produces: the point of a transpiled language isn’t for its output to necessarily be readable but first and foremost fast. You wouldnt expect c to pro…

> the point of a transpiled language isn’t for its output to necessarily be readable but first and foremost fast. You wouldnt expect c to produce understandable assembly in all cases, would you? I would like to argue about this philosophy. When your target output is not readable, then you restrict the developer to work inside your upper-level language. This is fine if your upper layer is robust and transparent enough…

The idea is that yes, you do 99.9% of your work in Haxe and it is robust enough to handle things. Only times you might drop down to your native compiled language is if you want to interface with a native library/component for which there is no 3rd party extension to Haxe yet. Even then there are Haxe based methods to fit most of those cases too.

I think the analogy is accurate: Haxe is not meant to be used to compile to native and then modified in native further. It can be... but the general usecase is to write everything in Haxe and not have to then modify the transpiled result. Similar to typescript in a way... you can add JavaScript after the fact, but most likely you’d directly add native untyped JavaScript within your Typescript code, not directly to your transpiled result.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#53

Post by zwetan »

roywiggins wrote: post #14

I am glad Haxe is still going strong. I remember when it was an alternate language for the Flash virtual machine- everyone thought it was very cool at the time. Now Flash is dead, long live Haxe!

you're comparing apples and oranges

Flash (a browser plugin) being dead does not make ActionScript (a programming language) dead

you can use ActionScript to publish with Adobe AIR and Haxe AFAIK can do that too

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#54

Post by codr4 »

coldtea wrote: post #28
russellbeattie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic Microsoft: Embrace, extend, extinguish. God I hate Typescript!

Was this response sent from 1998 via a time machine?

Do you know what the best predictor of future behavior is? They're acting all nice and friendly right now, wasn't always like that and there's no reason to assume it always will be. Even the catholic church is pretty chill these days, but give them enough power and they'll have people burning at stakes in no time.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#55

Post by jdonaldson »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #20
dyarosla wrote: post #12

Like the author, I too have the same opinion after having used Haxe for over 5 years. Five years on from starting with Haxe at FontStruct, I’m genuinely surprised to find that I feel no regret whatsoever regarding our decision to go with the technology. I absolutely adore the language. Not only is it awesome at transpiling/compiling to native across this whole spectrum of targets, the language itself keeps surprising…

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

I'm shuddering over the thought of porting and maintaining the scala and js code. Are you using Scala.js?

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#56

Post by vezycash »

codr4 wrote: post #54
coldtea wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this response sent from 1998 via a time machine?

Do you know what the best predictor of future behavior is? They're acting all nice and friendly right now, wasn't always like that and there's no reason to assume it always will be. Even the catholic church is pretty chill these days, but give them enough power and they'll have people burning at stakes in no time.

If you became supreme leader of your country, you'll get power drunk in no time. And it's not just you. It's everyone. Power corrupts people. Absolute power corrupts absolutely!

Remember how developers shunned Windows Phone and paid lip service to firefox os, and everything else apart from IOS and android?

Well, you can see how the power is surely corrupting Google. If you don't see it now, give it time. But it's even too late right now.

No amount of bitching will make Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and other "big bullies" play nice. What will? Strong, credible competitive threats.

You think Intel processors are expensive? Without AMD Intel processors would cost 4x as much. How much battery life would Intel PCs have without ARM? In fact, I assure you that without AMD, ARM would also be dead because Intel would have simply forbidden their partners from using ARM - the same way Google discourages top android manufacturers from using android forks.

About ur catholic reference - there's only one reason why Catholic churches are "pretty chill these days." And that's competition. New protestant churches are sprouting like grasses everywhere - competition has diluted the power of the church.

Competition is the key to niceness. Just look at the behavior of US ISPs.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#57

Post by codr4 »

vezycash wrote: post #56
codr4 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what the best predictor of future behavior is? They're acting all nice and friendly right now, wasn't always like that and there's no reason to assume it always will be. Even the catholic church is pretty chill these days, but give them enough power and they'll have people burning at stakes in no time.

If you became supreme leader of your country, you'll get power drunk in no time. And it's not just you. It's everyone. Power corrupts people. Absolute power corrupts absolutely! Remember how developers shunned Windows Phone and paid lip service to firefox os, and everything else apart from IOS and android? Well, you can see how the power is surely corrupting Google. If you don't see it now, give it time. But it's eve…

Mostly agree...

The reason it's not all about power/competition is that corruption is very easy to get into your system; be that individual, corporate or otherwise; and tricky as hell to weed out. Once you've been there and done that, the bar is set lower for relapse.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#58

Post by titanix2 »

zwetan wrote: post #53
roywiggins wrote: post #14

I am glad Haxe is still going strong. I remember when it was an alternate language for the Flash virtual machine- everyone thought it was very cool at the time. Now Flash is dead, long live Haxe!

you're comparing apples and oranges Flash (a browser plugin) being dead does not make ActionScript (a programming language) dead you can use ActionScript to publish with Adobe AIR and Haxe AFAIK can do that too

No he's right. Haxe was developed by a French game company to target the Flash runtime instead of using Adobe's compiler. It can also compile to other languages: it was uses to code the full stack in the same language will using popular runtimes at the time (PHP, Javascript, Flash).

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#59

Post by markmark »

m_sahaf wrote: post #6
sdegutis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.

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…

I think credit has to go to Anders (or perhaps just the whole team). I think the experience of already shipping multiple languages that were used by millions and learning lessons from those has helped enormously in building a language that is actually adopted.

See the discussions of soundness versus usability in typescript where they took a lot of heat from some people, but I believe absolutely have made the correct compromises.

Re: The Joy of Haxe

#60

Post by mromnia »

Is it possible to use Haxe for anything except gamedev and keep the crossplatform aspect? For example for backend webdev, it seems like you can compile to nodeJS and use express, but then you can't really compile to any other platform. You can compile to PHP, but you're also stuck with PHP frameworks.

Basically what I'm saying is that for Haxe to be truly crossplatform, it requires Haxe-native frameworks in the target domain. But that doesn't really seem to be the case outside of games, so that advantage is lost.

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