
Haxe – Opensource Cross-Platform Toolkit - bigbugbag
http://haxe.org/
======
timr
Ah, Haxe...we used it to build the video player at Justin.tv, because it had a
reasonable build pipeline to SWF and some nice language features.

I rather enjoyed the language. Certainly, it's a lot nicer than working in
Flash directly.

~~~
austenallred
Does Twitch still use Haxe?

~~~
timr
No idea. I thought they moved to HTML5 video...

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doppp
Many great games were/are being made in Haxe.

\- Papers, Please [0] by Lucas Pope.

\- Dead Cells [1] by Motion Twin, a collective linked to the creator of Haxe.

\- Evoland [2], Evoland 2 [3], Northgard [4] made by Shiro Games (studio of
the creator of Haxe).

\- rymdkapsel [5] and twofold inc. [6] by grapefrukt games.

\- Topsoil [7] by Nico Prins.

\- The Westport Independent [8] by Double Zero One Zero.

\- Defender's Quest series [9] by Level Up Labs.

\- Fidel Dungeon Rescue by [10] Daniel Benmergui.

Other popular games such as Threes [11] and QWOP [12] were ported to HTML5
with Luxe Engine [13]. Popular game development frameworks and engines include
OpenFL [14], HaxeFlixel [15] and Heaps [16].

[0] [http://papersplea.se](http://papersplea.se)

[1] [https://dead-cells.com](https://dead-cells.com)

[2] [http://evoland.shirogames.com](http://evoland.shirogames.com)

[3] [http://www.evoland2.com](http://www.evoland2.com)

[4] [http://northgard.net](http://northgard.net)

[5] [https://rymdkapsel.com](https://rymdkapsel.com)

[6] [https://twofoldinc.com](https://twofoldinc.com)

[7] [https://www.topsoilgame.com](https://www.topsoilgame.com)

[8]
[http://www.doublezeroonezero.com/westport.html](http://www.doublezeroonezero.com/westport.html)

[9]
[http://www.defendersquest.com/index.html](http://www.defendersquest.com/index.html)

[10]
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/573170/Fidel_Dungeon_Rescu...](http://store.steampowered.com/app/573170/Fidel_Dungeon_Rescue/)

[11] [http://play.threesgame.com](http://play.threesgame.com)

[12]
[http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html?webgl=true](http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html?webgl=true)

[13] [https://luxeengine.com](https://luxeengine.com)

[14] [http://www.openfl.org](http://www.openfl.org)

[15] [http://haxeflixel.com](http://haxeflixel.com)

[16] [https://github.com/HeapsIO/heaps](https://github.com/HeapsIO/heaps)

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MoOmer
The Haxe community is generally pretty great. [http://haxe.io](http://haxe.io)
provides a pretty rad community round-up every week, and though I don't use
Haxe much, the work put into the framework is awesome to see.

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vram22
What is the market demand for Haxe like, for employees and freelancers, anyone
know from personal experience?

Edit: To make it more clear, I just looked at:

[http://haxe.org/use-cases/who-uses-haxe.html](http://haxe.org/use-cases/who-
uses-haxe.html)

and that page does show that many well-known companies are using it. My
question is more about the {perceived|anecdotal} usage level that anyone
thinks it has in the industry, vis-a-vis other products in roughly the same
space. Asking with a view to whether I should consider learning it for work.

Edit 2: Checking out [http://haxe.io/](http://haxe.io/) based on MoOmer's
comment.

~~~
georgemcbay
Market demand for haxe is probably not enough to justify learning the
language, but the language is incredibly easy to pick up for anyone who has
done any development in ActionScript/JavaScript/ECMAScript type languages.

It more or less feels like a class-based, typed (often inferred type)
JavaScript. If you have any experience in the class of JavaScript-like
languages, learning haxe is basically no effort beyond just learning a new set
of build tools and the haxe runtime APIs.

I used it a lot when I was working for Chumby because the language could
target the ActionScript/AVM runtime that was used for Chumby widgets and was
in many ways a far superior language to ActionScript 2. (ActionScript 3 was
also very good, but the Flash player on Chumby devices didn't support AVM2
until just about the time the company went through a very near death
experience [though it is still alive thanks to the efforts of Duane Maxwell]).

~~~
vram22
Thanks for the answer - useful. Cool to know you worked on Chumby - I remember
reading about it some time after it was created, maybe on the O'Reilly site.
Seemed like an innovative device.

~~~
georgemcbay
The Chumby was a cool device (or rather, set of devices) for sure!

The common wisdom was that the introduction of the smartphone basically doomed
it, but in retrospect you could look at it as something like a before-its-time
Amazon Echo Show (which Google is supposedly making a competitor to right now
as well)...

There appears to be modern market for this type of thing, though newer devices
are certainly benefiting from everything that came along with the smartphone
revolution like super cheap SoC packages, cheap high resolution displays,
cheap capacitive panels, more mainline support for embedded devices in the
form of modern Linux kernels, Android, etc.

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leowoo91
A Haxe developer with 3 years of experience here. I'm at the point to cross
compile projects for IOS from Linux & Docker.

I started coding Haxe as a transition from being a AS3 Flash dev. At first,
I've found the name odd and the idea of cross-platform is bloated but I came
back for following reasons:

\- Language being almost same as Actionscript 3, which I already knew and
which I made stable income in past with.

\- Native compilation. While this sounds bloated, I never had a critical issue
since I rarely deploy more than 2 platforms, and I see difference is very
small when I don't use a platform specific library.

\- Despite small community, as because libraries and tools are intuitive
enough, ease of use overtaken my need of too much help. Project leaders are
very responsive and energetic if you get confused anyway.

Only thing you will notice is that, the build tools and package management
needs a bit revolution if community will grow further but I had no issues
until today. Most of the time I prepared a Dockerfile to freeze everything and
moved on.

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pier25
Why hasn't haxe taken off in your opinion? On paper it looks amazing.

I tried it a couple of years ago and while I loved the language (I have a
strong AS3 background) I felt there were too many moving parts that rely on
each other.

~~~
abiox
i'm sure there are more complicated reasons, but for me personally, the last
time i messed with it (a few years ago) the toolchain was clunky and the
language itself was dull.

hopefully things have improved!

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vturner
Curious project I wonder how it compares in actual portability to a project
like Kotlin? Been enjoying that language and the possibility of the apps core
functionality being cross platform.

~~~
Lerc
I have done a few Ludum Dares using Haxe.

I developed one into a a mobile game. It pretty much just worked across iOS,
Android, Native Linux, Native Windows and flash. It really does compile as the
same project and Build for $platform. With the exception of iOs which needs to
do shenanegans with xcode. Flash version as a free to play here
[http://fingswotidun.com/Potato/](http://fingswotidun.com/Potato/)

~~~
aptwebapps
Your game seems to be broken atm (Chrome latest).

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fenomas
Looks like it's using Flash, and like most sites the "ask" mechanism doesn't
work - it'll only show the SWF if you tell Chrome to allow it and then reload
the page.

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aptwebapps
Oh, of course. Didn't even notice that parent had specified it was flash.

