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For people who do not know; Monkey (the language this was forked from), like haXe, generates different languages which you pick when you compile a Monkey program. So running a Monkey program requires you to pick a language like Java, c++, js, c# etc; it will first compile Monkey to that language and then compile the code for that language to it’s runnable form.

I programmed a lot of Monkey (and haXe) when it just came out and liked it but both communities are focused on gaming frontend while I needed more focus on the serverside of gaming at a time and that became somewhat painful as I had to invent everything myself (not sure if that changed; this is a long time ago).




Both this and Haxe seem like undiscovered superpowers. What's the catch? And why the focus on game dev specifically?


They both came from gaming (Flash => haXe and Blitz+Flash => Monkey) so that's why they focus on it. haXe is really quite good these days, however the tooling is not what you expect from a modern language; more to the point (I am not sure if that is still the case but I believe it is); what you want is some kind of interpreter/debuggable language to create things in and then later compile to something to have the full experience of a modern programming language. Now debugging in haXe is just a pain, especially if you need to work in one of the slower compiling backend languages; it is a pain to work with. But I wrote fairly large codebases with both of them and I do like them. It is a bit of a shame they just don't join forces; the projects need libraries, faster compilation, an interpreter (in my opinion) and better tooling. Joining forces for projects that are more or less 'the same' would make a lot of sense.




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