Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper Please too.
To add to this, the creator also used Haxe to port to Unity: https://dukope.com/devlogs/papers-please/mobile/
Lucas Pope's dev logs are great.
Haxe 4.3
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: Haxe 4.3
#42Does anyone have a good non-gaming use case for Haxe? It feels very nice to have multiple compilation targets and the language is great, but I never found an excuse to use it.
Internal frameworks seem to be a popular scenario for Haxe. Something where you are the vendor for the platform abstraction, not the consumer. Or you have a codebase that needs some incremental migration between targets.
This is stuff that is incredibly hard to justify as a hobby project but definitely in the realm of what Haxe does well.
Re: Haxe 4.3
#43Re: Haxe 4.3
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being able to cross-transpile (cross-compilation basically) to other languages is a huge selling point. You can, in one language, output libraries that are compatible with: JavaScript, Flash, Neko, PHP, C++, Cppia, Java, JVM, C#, Python, Lua, HashLink For example, wanna deploy a validation library that checks something and have it available in a ton of language directly? Using Haxe, you can get this very cheap.
In practice, this is hard. The problem is that you need to either have all the functionality you use written in Haxe - which is rarely if ever possible - or you have externs to equivalent libraries on all platforms . The libraries produced will also need to be interfaced from outside somehow, and for some of the targets you'll have to write additional wrappers for your lib. It's really hard to pull off when targeting…
Haxe's double-edged sword that it lets you approach cross-platform in an uncompromising fashion where you're really getting as close to the target as reasonably possible, while also abstracting away as much of it as possible, but it also directly exposes you to the high level of engineering effort necessary to achieve that.
A lot of what I encountered from my time using it(which I might return to someday) was that it became more irritating as you introduced more platform dependencies, but mostly because it became harder to build the project. And this was disproportionately true for targets with complex build processes(SWF was one of them back in the day, and C++ still is).
Some of it does get mitigated by doing a double layer of abstraction: your platform code has a shell of functionality that is handled using the native paradigms, but exposes an interface that Haxe code calls. And the Haxe code accesses your own abstractions, not the native ones.
But doing all of that can get away from "just getting a result", because then you're pushing more of the development onto the native target. If you don't have a clear view of what abstraction you want, you can get stuck on designing it.
Re: Haxe 4.3
#45Does anyone have a good non-gaming use case for Haxe? It feels very nice to have multiple compilation targets and the language is great, but I never found an excuse to use it.
same here, it's a forever top of mind but never to be practically used. The thought of having one language but can dish out frontend in JS, backend in python, jobs in C has been a dream of mine.
That sounds a lot like Nim. I haven’t used it myself, but I’m intrigued at the idea of having one language I can use in a lot of places.
Re: Haxe 4.3
#46Does anyone have a good non-gaming use case for Haxe? It feels very nice to have multiple compilation targets and the language is great, but I never found an excuse to use it.
The creator of http://haxeui.org/ makes a lot of (closed) projects for the health sector. I personally like to use to make some wxwidgets utilities apps with it. (And being able the html5 js target and android/ios (with openfl) target.
Are any of your tools open source/something we can look at? Just curious about examples…
Re: Haxe 4.3
#47Haxe development doesn’t seem very active: the last minor release, 4.2.5, was 13 months ago. The last major release, 4.2.0, was two years ago.
Even if Haxe was effectively feature complete, I would expect maintenance for bug fixes and keeping up to date with evolving platforms and backends, especially because Haxe supports so many targets.
Re: Haxe 4.3
#48Haxe development doesn’t seem very active: the last minor release, 4.2.5, was 13 months ago. The last major release, 4.2.0, was two years ago. Even if Haxe was effectively feature complete, I would expect maintenance for bug fixes and keeping up to date with evolving platforms and backends, especially because Haxe supports so many targets. https://haxe.org/download/list/
Haxe’s development is fairly active. You can see 41 PRs were merged, an additional 13 more were opened and 125 issues were closed in the last month:
https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/pulse/monthly
The nightly builds should probably be promoted to patch releases more often though.
Re: Haxe 4.3
#49Haxe development doesn’t seem very active: the last minor release, 4.2.5, was 13 months ago. The last major release, 4.2.0, was two years ago. Even if Haxe was effectively feature complete, I would expect maintenance for bug fixes and keeping up to date with evolving platforms and backends, especially because Haxe supports so many targets. https://haxe.org/download/list/
Haxe’s development is fairly active. You can see 41 PRs were merged, an additional 13 more were opened and 125 issues were closed in the last month: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/pulse/monthly The nightly builds should probably be promoted to patch releases more often though.
I’m glad to hear that. I had wondered whether most Haxe users used the nightly releases. That might be more common for projects that have a few main contributors: they fix issues blocking them and use their own builds without the overhead making new public releases.
Re: Haxe 4.3
#50For those unfamiliar with Haxe, imagine Actionscript, but without tying it to Flash Player.
if you were familiar with actionscript, you'd prob. have heard of haxe! And if you weren't...well, it's not a useful simile...
I guess to describe haxe to someone, i'd say it's closer to typescript, but compiles down to many different languages.