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Comment by m0th87 | Hacker News Reader

How does Haxe manage impedance mismatches between it and so many target languages? I've never heard of anything pulling that off successfully. Maybe Eiffel? But then, who uses Eiffel?

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Another thing is the Haxe standard library, which guarantees certain features across all targets, including features that aren't normally available (like, say, Reflection in C++, if I understand correctly). If the feature is natively available, it falls through to the native implementation, if not, on that target the standard library provides enough code to enable the feature.

Assumably it compiles down to a subset that is easy to port—basically take the VM approach except make it AOT-oriented instead of JIT-oriented, like LLVM.

The haxe target languages aren't very different, other than some superficial syntactical and their standard libraries being somewhat different. Working around those aren't "difficult" (which isn't to say it isn't a lot of work to implement of course).

I'd be surprised if haxe could get a target language such as haskell (unless if they created a specific lib in haskell to emulate an imperative program and mutable state).

> (unless if they created a specific lib in haskell to emulate an imperative program and mutable state)

Writing a vm in haskell is hardly out of the question.

i would expect it to perform poorly (but then again, i m only guessing here).

Nothing about haskell prevents poor mutable state performance. If anything they could basically compile it down to unsafe haskell that's c-like.

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