41–50 of 105 posts
Does anyone have any real world experiences with Haxe? I've been hearing about it for years and generally thought "wow, that's neat!" but that's been it. Does it actually achieve what it aims for?
It’s been used to make a number of popular games - Dead Cells and Northgard come to mind, and I think there is a decent number more.
Does anyone have any real world experiences with Haxe? I've been hearing about it for years and generally thought "wow, that's neat!" but that's been it. Does it actually achieve what it aims for?
It’s been used to make a number of popular games - Dead Cells and Northgard come to mind, and I think there is a decent number more.
I can't tell from the project page whether this is an obligate-GC language.
I can't tell from the project page whether this is an obligate-GC language.
Does anyone have any real world experiences with Haxe? I've been hearing about it for years and generally thought "wow, that's neat!" but that's been it. Does it actually achieve what it aims for?
- Papers Please
- Dead Cells
- Northgard
- Rymdkapsel
- Evoland
I remember thinking that this was a MUCH better language than AS3 for Flash & Flex development. Now, 10 years later, I'm honestly surprised that it still exists and is being maintained. I'm curious how popular it is at this point? Is there a big benefit over something like Typescript now?
I have not used Haxe, but looked over at it while writing Typescript - one thing I noticed were macros, which could make writing high-performance Typescript/javascript much more bearable. For example iterator protocols in JavaScript almost necessarily allocate memory (especially for user-defined types), but manually writing a for loop does not (but is a bunch of copypasta for a complex data structure).
It predated Typescript, so at the time the killer feature was being able to write type-safe JavaScript, and being able to share code with a backend which is potentially another language (like PHP).
These days I’m at a company with a lot of TS, and too many other languages (Elm, Ruby, Kotlin, Elixir...) so we’re not looking to add something like Haxe, but I often still miss the expressive type system, the really nice language server integrations, having the multiple output targets so it’s the same language everywhere, and the type safe macro system.
So I often use Haxe for hobby projects still, but then I miss things from the JS ecosystem. You have access to NPM but there’s no equivalent project to DefinitelyTyped. Some of the tools integrate well (webpack as an example), some don’t (Jest). React works, but the way JSX works doesn’t integrate as nicely with the language server. Etc
I also missed some modern es6 syntax. Haxe finally got arrow functions in v4. The thing I’m excited by in this release is module level fields - previously everything had to be in a class, now they don’t. Haxe was already good for writing functional style code. Now when you read the source code it’ll look like it and not have the “class” keyword when you don’t need it.