6 ms·

Haxe 4.3

143 points by MokaAkashiya 3y ago

MokaAkashiya 3y ago
There is also review of new features https://www.elitemastereric.com/Haxe-430/ https://www.elitemastereric.com/Haxe-430/
- 542458 3y ago
  Good post. That safe navigation operator is very cool and something I wish you could do in JS.
  - zhawn 3y ago
    Not sure if I'm missing some sarcasm but JavaScript has had the equivalent Optional chaining operator for years now https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optional_chaining https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
    - 542458 3y ago
      No, I honestly didn’t know about it! I should have googled it before making my comment… Thanks for letting me know.
    - jholman 3y ago
      Everyone likes to bag on JS without being willing to learn.
  - johnfn 3y ago
    You can! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optional_chaining https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
- klibertp 3y ago
  Last time I checked on master - 2-3 months ago - ?. was implemented, but ?? was still missing. Good to see the implementation finalized. I also saw `overload` for inlines, that's really nice, having to expose functions taking Any and dispatching on dynamic type was one of the pain points in Haxe for me. A shame it's only for inline functions for now. Local static vars is something I didn't see, it looks like static variables in functions in C, right? I'm not quite sure how useful that would be. I guess the scopes are not shared, so `static var instance` in one method is different than `instance` declared the same way in another function. Still, the properties with getters also work. Better errors are always welcome, custom defines... I know I wanted these at some point, but can't recall right now what for. Stdlib got a bit more of concurrency support with Condition and Semaphore - good, my target doesn't do threading, but has coroutines, so having more options to control concurrency is nice. All in all, very nice release with null-related operators being the feature I missed the most. I'm not sure about default type parameters, and numerical suffixes don't matter on my platform (everything is a double on runtime), but numerical separators are nice. Steadily, Haxe gets easier to use and safer. Macros are becoming more ergonomic, too, which is great, as they're essential to effective Haxe programming.
- bardan 3y ago
  Also, here is an official repo where you can look at proposed and accepted changes: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution
sieabahlpark 3y ago
I looked at Haxe but have trouble figuring out what real benefits it would have over something like Godot at this point.
- karpierz 3y ago
  Haxe has been, and continues to be, used to ship commercially successful games.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Could you share some examples?
    - roblabla 3y ago
      Dead cells is the most recent and prominent example.
    - paraboul 3y ago
      All games by Shiro games (founded by Nicolas Cannasse, creator of Haxe) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiro_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiro_Games
      - illiarian 3y ago
        Oh wow. Dune: Spice Wars is also in Haxe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZcKyqLcjzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZcKyqLcjzc
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - karpierz 3y ago
      Dead Cells, Papers Please, Dicey Dungeons
    - rickstanley 3y ago
      Northgard, not an amazing game to me, but successful nonetheless.
awinter-py 3y ago
super interesting that a big part of the lift here is buildsystems + targeting different platforms I've tried tauri + neutralino this year (both electron alternatives), and they depend immensely on buildsystems + platform targeting. flutter + react native play in this space too
Dwedit 3y ago
For those unfamiliar with Haxe, imagine Actionscript, but without tying it to Flash Player.
- chii 3y ago
  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.
qsort 3y ago
Does 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.
- internetter 3y ago
  Maybe some library for codebases in multiple languages at a company? I wonder what the performance story is...
- JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
  I’d say it’s pretty good for touch screen kiosks, digital signage, and certain interactive creative works.
- catach 3y ago
  A statically typed javascript with pattern matching can be nice.
- vr46 3y ago
  It was used for Smart TVs quite a bit.
- Hi_Everyone 3y ago
  The creator of http://haxeui.org/ 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.
  - schemescape 3y ago
    Are any of your tools open source/something we can look at? Just curious about examples…
- hyuuu 3y ago
  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.
_benj 3y ago
I’m very curious about Haxe. From using ldtk and looking into haxeui and openfl, it looks like it could be good for multi platform gui apps. I’ve used godot for that purpose before but all the game stuff and limited libraries gets in the way of making it easy for gui development. And seems like with hashlink I can compile to a single binary instead of the nightmare of electron or Python gui apps packaging
fayten 3y ago
I really love Haxe. A truly multi-paradigm language with good support for GADTs, OOP, structural and nominal types, lambdas, and a lot of practical sugar on top. The macro system and abstract types add enormous flexibility that I miss when going back to C# or Java. The language is a bit verbose, but I prefer it and generally add type annotations instead of using type inference (unless I’m dealing with a super gnarly generic type). The language shines in the graphics space since some of the Flash community gravitated to Haxe. I’ve found that it works great as a client/server language similar to a typescript frontend/backend stack. The benefit with Haxe is that the backend isn’t limited to Node, it can run on JVM, bare metal with C++, Openresty with Lua, and anywhere Python runs. It’s pretty easy to implement F# style type providers with the macro system as well. There is also a C# target, however, there are talks of deprecating. Hopefully we will see a revival with Reflaxe, another way to make new targets, or maybe even a CLR target. https://github.com/RobertBorghese/reflaxe https://github.com/RobertBorghese/reflaxe Lastly, I’m very excited about Ammer the universal FFI for Haxe by Aurel. https://aurel300.github.io/ammer/ https://aurel300.github.io/ammer/ My hope is that the community will rally around Ammer and bring in a lot of native libraries to all targets.
cpeterso 3y ago
Haxe 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/ https://haxe.org/download/list/
- fayten 3y ago
  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 https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/pulse/monthly The nightly builds should probably be promoted to patch releases more often though.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    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.

143 points by MokaAkashiya 3y ago

There is also review of new features https://www.elitemastereric.com/Haxe-430/ https://www.elitemastereric.com/Haxe-430/

542458 3y ago
Good post. That safe navigation operator is very cool and something I wish you could do in JS.
- zhawn 3y ago
  Not sure if I'm missing some sarcasm but JavaScript has had the equivalent Optional chaining operator for years now https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optional_chaining https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
  - 542458 3y ago
    No, I honestly didn’t know about it! I should have googled it before making my comment… Thanks for letting me know.
  - jholman 3y ago
    Everyone likes to bag on JS without being willing to learn.
- johnfn 3y ago
  You can! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optional_chaining https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
klibertp 3y ago
Last time I checked on master - 2-3 months ago - ?. was implemented, but ?? was still missing. Good to see the implementation finalized. I also saw `overload` for inlines, that's really nice, having to expose functions taking Any and dispatching on dynamic type was one of the pain points in Haxe for me. A shame it's only for inline functions for now. Local static vars is something I didn't see, it looks like static variables in functions in C, right? I'm not quite sure how useful that would be. I guess the scopes are not shared, so `static var instance` in one method is different than `instance` declared the same way in another function. Still, the properties with getters also work. Better errors are always welcome, custom defines... I know I wanted these at some point, but can't recall right now what for. Stdlib got a bit more of concurrency support with Condition and Semaphore - good, my target doesn't do threading, but has coroutines, so having more options to control concurrency is nice. All in all, very nice release with null-related operators being the feature I missed the most. I'm not sure about default type parameters, and numerical suffixes don't matter on my platform (everything is a double on runtime), but numerical separators are nice. Steadily, Haxe gets easier to use and safer. Macros are becoming more ergonomic, too, which is great, as they're essential to effective Haxe programming.
bardan 3y ago
Also, here is an official repo where you can look at proposed and accepted changes: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution

sieabahlpark 3y ago

I looked at Haxe but have trouble figuring out what real benefits it would have over something like Godot at this point.

karpierz 3y ago
Haxe has been, and continues to be, used to ship commercially successful games.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Could you share some examples?
  - roblabla 3y ago
    Dead cells is the most recent and prominent example.
  - paraboul 3y ago
    All games by Shiro games (founded by Nicolas Cannasse, creator of Haxe) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiro_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiro_Games
    - illiarian 3y ago
      Oh wow. Dune: Spice Wars is also in Haxe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZcKyqLcjzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZcKyqLcjzc
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - karpierz 3y ago
    Dead Cells, Papers Please, Dicey Dungeons
  - rickstanley 3y ago
    Northgard, not an amazing game to me, but successful nonetheless.

awinter-py 3y ago

super interesting that a big part of the lift here is buildsystems + targeting different platforms I've tried tauri + neutralino this year (both electron alternatives), and they depend immensely on buildsystems + platform targeting. flutter + react native play in this space too

Dwedit 3y ago

For those unfamiliar with Haxe, imagine Actionscript, but without tying it to Flash Player.

chii 3y ago
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.

qsort 3y ago

Does 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.

internetter 3y ago
Maybe some library for codebases in multiple languages at a company? I wonder what the performance story is...
JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
I’d say it’s pretty good for touch screen kiosks, digital signage, and certain interactive creative works.
catach 3y ago
A statically typed javascript with pattern matching can be nice.
vr46 3y ago
It was used for Smart TVs quite a bit.
Hi_Everyone 3y ago
The creator of http://haxeui.org/ 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.
- schemescape 3y ago
  Are any of your tools open source/something we can look at? Just curious about examples…
hyuuu 3y ago
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.

_benj 3y ago

I’m very curious about Haxe. From using ldtk and looking into haxeui and openfl, it looks like it could be good for multi platform gui apps. I’ve used godot for that purpose before but all the game stuff and limited libraries gets in the way of making it easy for gui development. And seems like with hashlink I can compile to a single binary instead of the nightmare of electron or Python gui apps packaging

fayten 3y ago

I really love Haxe. A truly multi-paradigm language with good support for GADTs, OOP, structural and nominal types, lambdas, and a lot of practical sugar on top. The macro system and abstract types add enormous flexibility that I miss when going back to C# or Java. The language is a bit verbose, but I prefer it and generally add type annotations instead of using type inference (unless I’m dealing with a super gnarly generic type). The language shines in the graphics space since some of the Flash community gravitated to Haxe. I’ve found that it works great as a client/server language similar to a typescript frontend/backend stack. The benefit with Haxe is that the backend isn’t limited to Node, it can run on JVM, bare metal with C++, Openresty with Lua, and anywhere Python runs. It’s pretty easy to implement F# style type providers with the macro system as well. There is also a C# target, however, there are talks of deprecating. Hopefully we will see a revival with Reflaxe, another way to make new targets, or maybe even a CLR target. https://github.com/RobertBorghese/reflaxe https://github.com/RobertBorghese/reflaxe Lastly, I’m very excited about Ammer the universal FFI for Haxe by Aurel. https://aurel300.github.io/ammer/ https://aurel300.github.io/ammer/ My hope is that the community will rally around Ammer and bring in a lot of native libraries to all targets.

cpeterso 3y ago

Haxe 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/ https://haxe.org/download/list/

fayten 3y ago
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 https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/pulse/monthly The nightly builds should probably be promoted to patch releases more often though.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  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.