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A success story for Haxe

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Re: A success story for Haxe

#2

Post by explorigin »

I'm in the process of learning Haxe. I hope it becomes more popular since you can have macros, static type-checking and a shared code-base with one language. You can have all these things with Javascript but not at the same time (that I know of).

Here's a port of the jQuery TodoMVC for anyone wanting a quick example of what a web-target would look like. https://github.com/explorigin/todomvc-haxe

Re: A success story for Haxe

#3

Post by RussianCow »

I'm looking into potentially using Haxe as a way to share code between iOS and Android. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has made a good, open source Objective-C/Swift target for it yet. (There is a Swift target here[0] but it hasn't been committed to since October 8 and doesn't seem production-ready by any means.) I would contribute one myself but I have no experience with OCaml, and don't currently have time to learn it.

I like the idea of this approach way more than the one that projects like Xamarin take (build a common runtime on top of each platform) because you don't incur any runtime overhead, and debugging would (in theory) be much easier because you can just debug the native language instead of needing to understand the extra VM layer on top. As a bonus, with Haxe you can also target the web, which you can't do with Xamarin/RoboVM/RubyMotion/etc.

Has anyone tried anything like this (not necessarily with Haxe) and had success with it?

[0]: https://github.com/ralcr/swift-target

Edit: Wording and clarification, added bit about targeting web.

Re: A success story for Haxe

#5

Post by benologist »

RussianCow wrote: post #3

I'm looking into potentially using Haxe as a way to share code between iOS and Android. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has made a good, open source Objective-C/Swift target for it yet. (There is a Swift target here[0] but it hasn't been committed to since October 8 and doesn't seem production-ready by any means.) I would contribute one myself but I have no experience with OCaml, and don't currently have…

I've been using haxe/openfl in production for 1.5 years and wouldn't really recommend it. Originally cross-platform code was a really good idea very few people had or executed well and haxe's warts were forgivable, today that's a capability many languages have without the hassle. I think the only unique value left in Haxe is outputting Flash.

Re: A success story for Haxe

#6

Post by jdonaldson »

RussianCow wrote: post #3

I'm looking into potentially using Haxe as a way to share code between iOS and Android. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has made a good, open source Objective-C/Swift target for it yet. (There is a Swift target here[0] but it hasn't been committed to since October 8 and doesn't seem production-ready by any means.) I would contribute one myself but I have no experience with OCaml, and don't currently have…

There's been some more discussion and developments on this recently: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haxelang/KhrRlizYwX8

I think the focus is going to be on generating objective c, rather than swift. Although, that's the entire extent of my understanding.

Re: A success story for Haxe

#7

Post by jdonaldson »

benologist wrote: post #5
RussianCow wrote: post #3

I'm looking into potentially using Haxe as a way to share code between iOS and Android. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has made a good, open source Objective-C/Swift target for it yet. (There is a Swift target here[0] but it hasn't been committed to since October 8 and doesn't seem production-ready by any means.) I would contribute one myself but I have no experience with OCaml, and don't currently have…

I've been using haxe/openfl in production for 1.5 years and wouldn't really recommend it. Originally cross-platform code was a really good idea very few people had or executed well and haxe's warts were forgivable, today that's a capability many languages have without the hassle. I think the only unique value left in Haxe is outputting Flash.

what languages have a platform comparable to OpenFL?

Re: A success story for Haxe

#8

Post by RussianCow »

benologist wrote: post #5
RussianCow wrote: post #3

I'm looking into potentially using Haxe as a way to share code between iOS and Android. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has made a good, open source Objective-C/Swift target for it yet. (There is a Swift target here[0] but it hasn't been committed to since October 8 and doesn't seem production-ready by any means.) I would contribute one myself but I have no experience with OCaml, and don't currently have…

I've been using haxe/openfl in production for 1.5 years and wouldn't really recommend it. Originally cross-platform code was a really good idea very few people had or executed well and haxe's warts were forgivable, today that's a capability many languages have without the hassle. I think the only unique value left in Haxe is outputting Flash.

I think the value of Haxe comes from being able to use one language across platforms, not anything specific to the language itself.

Could you speak to the specific "warts" you found while using it? I'm genuinely curious.

Re: A success story for Haxe

#9

Post by RussianCow »

jdonaldson wrote: post #6
RussianCow wrote: post #3

I'm looking into potentially using Haxe as a way to share code between iOS and Android. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has made a good, open source Objective-C/Swift target for it yet. (There is a Swift target here[0] but it hasn't been committed to since October 8 and doesn't seem production-ready by any means.) I would contribute one myself but I have no experience with OCaml, and don't currently have…

There's been some more discussion and developments on this recently: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haxelang/KhrRlizYwX8 I think the focus is going to be on generating objective c, rather than swift. Although, that's the entire extent of my understanding.

Yeah, I agree that an Objective-C target makes more sense because it's more broadly useful (and Apple is still making backwards-incompatible changes to Swift). Thanks for the link!
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