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Interesting to see it's written in Haxe, a language I've never heard before. I've been looking for a "hacker's language" which could fit in practically any nich

Interesting to see it's written in Haxe, a language I've never heard before. I've been looking for a "hacker's language" which could fit in practically any niche and this might just be it. With optional static typing, compilation to multiple targets (notably C++) I really don't understand why it's not more popular. Seems like a really pragmatic language whose designers understood the needs of developers.

zengid 3y ago
I believe Haxe was made to replace flash. Not sure why it isn't more popular, but it has a lot of folks from the game community that use it.
- OmarShehata 3y ago
  I was a big believer in Haxe, it seemed perfect. The main issue I and many people had at its inception was that the ecosystem was very fragmented. The promise was "write once, run everywhere" (which is what we had with Flash), but each platform you wanted to actually compile on was a whole process, often undocumented, with lots of caveats, and having to hunt for third party community wrappers to do the native integrations you want etc. This was ~10 years ago, I'm sure the current state of the ecosystem is very different (no idea), but this is the reason why I was never able to adopt it, and I heard the same thing from dozens of Flash creators at the time.
- Dwedit 3y ago
  Dead Cells was made in Haxe.
tombert 3y ago
Haxe is pretty neat, and worth playing with if you haven't. I don't do games so I haven't done much, but it kind of feels like "What if ActionScript 3 was allowed to break out of the Flash world, and keep evolving?". At some point I should really do more with it and make a game or something.
LeftHandPath 3y ago
It looks neat. Reminds me of a lot of ideas I had of making a way to tightly couple classes/logic between PHP (server side) and JS (client side) when making websites and web apps. It came up a lot when making HTML-based forms. I’d define them all in PHP, but the experience is best without a page load, so typically I define some typescript object to send the form via Ajax. I got tired of having to define all the field names in both places (awful for maintenance), so instead typescript uses AJAX to ask the server for the list of inputs it needs to grab and send. It sounds like Haxe could be a much nicer way to do stuff like that: https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/
- zilti 3y ago
  Sounds like a job for HTMX
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > I got tired of having to define all the field names in both places (awful for maintenance) Haxe might be overkill for that. Usually (unless youre doing a SPA) you use PHP or a templating language to dynamicly render the form server side based on either data or metadata. Haxe can indeed be useful for more complicated versions of that situation, where you need a complicated state machine or algorithm in more than one language.
earslap 3y ago
Haxe is pretty established, but not well known. Perpetually the underdog. And totally awesome. It also has macros where you can transform the AST! You can do some amazing compile time stuff that very small number of languages support, and the features are pretty mature. If you want a hacker's language but don't want a lisp give Haxe a shot.
zilti 3y ago
Same reason why most really neat things aren't. The people who are good at crafting neat things are bad at creating hype for it. Meanwhile, the bullshit bingo bros come up with convoluted, marketable stuff and manage to generate hype.
Keyframe 3y ago
It was often talked about here on HN because (I think) player or part of system of justin.tv (twitch today) was written in it, and it being a part of YC..

zengid 3y ago

I believe Haxe was made to replace flash. Not sure why it isn't more popular, but it has a lot of folks from the game community that use it.

OmarShehata 3y ago
I was a big believer in Haxe, it seemed perfect. The main issue I and many people had at its inception was that the ecosystem was very fragmented. The promise was "write once, run everywhere" (which is what we had with Flash), but each platform you wanted to actually compile on was a whole process, often undocumented, with lots of caveats, and having to hunt for third party community wrappers to do the native integrations you want etc. This was ~10 years ago, I'm sure the current state of the ecosystem is very different (no idea), but this is the reason why I was never able to adopt it, and I heard the same thing from dozens of Flash creators at the time.
Dwedit 3y ago
Dead Cells was made in Haxe.

tombert 3y ago

Haxe is pretty neat, and worth playing with if you haven't. I don't do games so I haven't done much, but it kind of feels like "What if ActionScript 3 was allowed to break out of the Flash world, and keep evolving?". At some point I should really do more with it and make a game or something.

LeftHandPath 3y ago

It looks neat. Reminds me of a lot of ideas I had of making a way to tightly couple classes/logic between PHP (server side) and JS (client side) when making websites and web apps. It came up a lot when making HTML-based forms. I’d define them all in PHP, but the experience is best without a page load, so typically I define some typescript object to send the form via Ajax. I got tired of having to define all the field names in both places (awful for maintenance), so instead typescript uses AJAX to ask the server for the list of inputs it needs to grab and send. It sounds like Haxe could be a much nicer way to do stuff like that: https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/web/

zilti 3y ago
Sounds like a job for HTMX
shkkmo 3y ago
> I got tired of having to define all the field names in both places (awful for maintenance) Haxe might be overkill for that. Usually (unless youre doing a SPA) you use PHP or a templating language to dynamicly render the form server side based on either data or metadata. Haxe can indeed be useful for more complicated versions of that situation, where you need a complicated state machine or algorithm in more than one language.

earslap 3y ago

Haxe is pretty established, but not well known. Perpetually the underdog. And totally awesome. It also has macros where you can transform the AST! You can do some amazing compile time stuff that very small number of languages support, and the features are pretty mature. If you want a hacker's language but don't want a lisp give Haxe a shot.

zilti 3y ago

Same reason why most really neat things aren't. The people who are good at crafting neat things are bad at creating hype for it. Meanwhile, the bullshit bingo bros come up with convoluted, marketable stuff and manage to generate hype.

Keyframe 3y ago

It was often talked about here on HN because (I think) player or part of system of justin.tv (twitch today) was written in it, and it being a part of YC..