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Comment by olaf | Hacker News Reader

The original blog post of Nicolas Cannasse has a question mark at the end (very strange and confusing vibes, if the originator does not know ...), which is missing here, which makes me want to ask how serious Nicaolas Cannassee really is, what can he really offer right now? How serious is he really, I don't trust him. Does anyone use haxe successfully in a professional context and earns money through it, is this platform worth an investment (time, learning) or are there hidden maintenance-nightmares-producing or other shortcomings, which prevent professional reliable large scale use comparable to flash? I would like to read opinions of people who do successful business with haxe (edit: first hand info).

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Nicolas Cannasse is (usually) serious and incredibly smart and fairly well known among anyone who pays attention to "indie" PL design and/or functional programming in ML dialects (particularly Ocaml).

I used haxe for over a year creating dozens of end-user apps when I was working at chumby industries because our base runtime on those devices was FlashLite 3 with ActionScript 2.0 and haxe is a significantly better language than AS2 while still targeting the same Flash runtime.

IMO it is definitely a language worth checking out, particularly since it should be trivial to learn if you already know the language for whatever runtime it is you're targeting. It looks and feels very much like ActionScript/JavaScript, but with far less warts than either.

The macro system it has is awesome and allows for lots of compile-time code generation scenarios that can result in massive runtime optimizations if used well.

I use Haxe in a professional context and sometimes for exploratory experimental stuff. I use it in the context of a framework called Haxe NME that allows me to produce android and ios moible apps. I am also using it to transcompile to arm running arch linux machines, it has one of the fastest compilers I ever used when target compiling to neko and it can output code if needed; java, c#, c++, js, you name it they got it wired up. I am going to use it for online through the usage of externs and libs that are usually up to date and well maintained on github. Haxe is going to hit a big one when version 3 comes out next quarter, if you want to invest some time learning a language that is encompassing and very much alive you will find it to be a good tool for various applications. I have no connection to Haxe other than being a user.

You can have a look at the haxenme gallery to see a bunch of things that use Haxe and NME together.

http://www.haxenme.org/showcase/ http://www.haxenme.org/showcase/page-2

Of those in the community developing flash only games, I have encountered a strong tendency to move away from AS3 towards haxe simply because you get the same API with a better language, faster compiler and faster code.

The weak point of Haxe is in library bindings. As a relatively young language, It doesn't have bindings to the breadth of things that C++ or Python has.

The guys behind NME have made the workflow almost completely painless with a simple command-line tool that will download and install everything required to do development on a variety of platforms. See details for setup here. http://www.haxenme.org/developers/get-started

The disadvantage of NME is that it closely mirrors the Flash API. That's great if you are aiming for cross platform flash/other, but if you want to drop flash from your supported targets there are probably better API styles (which I believe is where Nicolas is heading with h2d)

I have written Games using NME, The Flash API directly and the HTML5 canvas directly. I'd like to have something that provided a Cross-platform glES interface across iOS, Android and WebGL/Javascript but currently no such system exists for haxe.

I know a few people who use haXe professionally.

One of them that I know personally is a professional Flash developer who used haXe exclusively for some times, because it had a better standard library than Flash (AS2 at this time) and generated lighter and faster SWF files. I remember him telling me that he made a somewhat huge (several hundred euros) donation to the project and that it still cost him less than buying the Macromedia Flash software. Since AS3 he's back to Flash thought.

Some others I know through their work: Motion Twin [1] for instance, who are the creators of a lot of very successful Flash games.

[1] http://motion-twin.com/

Motion-twin is Nicolas Cannasse's company. So they obviously use HaXe extensively.

I know, Motion-Twin is a company he cofounded. He recently left to start a new one: http://shirogames.com/.

Thanks for claryfying that, now p4bl0's post appears to me like more or less self promotion.

Huh what? I've never worked for Motion-Twin, and I actually never wrote any haXe or Flash myself. I'm just a programming language enthusiast (and student to an extent, since my PhD subject is in part about PL design) so I like to follow Nicolas Cannasse's work. I also happen to enjoy one of MT games (Alpha Bounce [1]) very much and to have web developers friends among whom one made me discover haXe years ago, talking very highly about the technology (that's how I discovered Cannasse's work too).

[1] http://www.alphabounce.com/

Sorry, self promotion in the sense, that a fan praises haxe but does not do business himself, which was not, what I was asking for.

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