
HaXe 2.08 - swah
http://ncannasse.fr/blog/haxe_2.08
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Cushman
Something about this gives me the willies... It feels like a language designed
on indie game forums for non-programmers who can about wrap their heads around
the basics of ActionScript. The value it brings doesn't really make sense for
a non-trivial project-- compiling for, say, Flash and <canvas> sounds nice,
but in what circumstance would I _really_ want the same code to target PHP,
AS3, and C++?

Even the name seems to be saying "Using this will make your game cooler!"

On the other hand, when I say that out loud, I probably sound like quite the
elitist... it's not doing any harm to me, and getting more people into coding
has gotta be a net good. Maybe I'm just not looking at it right as a
programmer rather than someone less technical who just wants to get their game
out to as many people as possible. Can anyone set me straight on this?

Whoever is downvoting me is _exactly_ who I mean.

~~~
p4bl0
Actually I know a Flash developer who used to use haXe instead of Macromedia
(and then Adobe) tools because the language and the standard library were
better, and also because the produced SWF files were lighter and executed
faster. He could avoid paying for the professional Flash tools and saved a lot
of money thanks to that (so he made a good donations to the haXe project).
This was before ActionScript 3 and I don't know if it holds since. But the
point is that it is clearly _not_ "a language designed on indie game forums
for non-programmers".

Also, I believe haXe is used for every projects of Motion-Twin[1], the company
at which Nicolas Canasse works. That means a lot of good flash games which a
lot of people are playing daily.

[1] <http://motion-twin.com/?force=1>

~~~
Cushman
Okay, that I totally buy. Macromedia's (and Adobe's) tools were pretty
abysmal.

And I guess that answers my question in general, too: It's not supposed to be
a general-purpose language, and for casual games specifically multi-platform
has a lot more cache.

I'd still like to see the PHP use case, though.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Motion Twin, I believe, use it to power their websites - the javascript, Flash
game code, server side multiplayer and web site code are all written in the
same language. That's ridiculously powerful for that specific use case.

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jxcole
HaXe is a great platform. I vastly prefer it to javascript because I am a big
fan of static typing. The only thing that irks me about their language is that
they have both interfaces and class extension but for some reason decided not
to have abstract classes.

This irks me because it seems to be a design choice; they aren't doing it
because they haven't gotten around to it, they aren't doing it because they
don't want to. I just don't get why they would leave this feature off but
still have extension. (I am totally fine with Go, which doesn't have abstract
classes but also doesn't have extension).

It's only a minor quibble I suppose, I still recommend developing in HaXe if
you can.

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shin_lao
HaXe is the technology behind the great game Hordes (<http://www.hordes.fr/>,
French only unfortunately).

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gregwebs
Apparently there are technologies that can compile this to C++, javascript +
CSS, Flash, webOS, and Android. <http://www.haxenme.org/>

I haven't used this, but javascript + types (with type inference) is very
appealing.

~~~
reitzensteinm
The tools are getting more and more streamlined, thanks in large part to the
guy who built that website. And of course Hugh, who made the C++ output and
nekonme, ridiculously cool pieces of engineering (nekonme is basically a
rewrite of the Flash API so it can run on any platform).

The first port took me a few months - there was a minefield of GC bugs,
libraries that had to be written, etc. The second port has taken about two
days - mostly revising my code back to the SVN version of nekonme. Port #3 I
am expecting to take a few hours at most.

There's a tool being written that simply spits out an XCode project - it's not
far away from being as simple as Unity.

On the other hand, Unity is getting a Flash export option - which is the major
benefit Haxe has currently.

