Shouldn't the title be, "Another success story for Haxe"? I thought the massive success of Lucas Pope's "Papers, Please" is validation enough of the framework: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please
(at least it was for me...I was amazed at how fast Pope built and ported a cross-platform game considering he's a one-man shop...though to be fair, he was also able to learn Flash and build games for Ludum Dare competitions...so he's probably an outlier :) )
While Haxe allows you to compile to pretty much everything using the same language, it doesn't use the same api for every target. Openfl[1], which is written in Haxe and allows you to use the flash api, compiles to pretty much anything using 1 codebase. "Papers, please" used openfl to achieve its portability so I guess it's a success story for openfl as well. Rhymdkapsel is another great game that uses it.
Learning Haxe is a great way of understanding how certain PL concepts map to different language implementations. You can write up a simple "hello world" example for the feature you're interested in, and see what it gets turned into in the output.
At first, I was hesitant to do much with the compiler since I don't know OCaml. But, I recently forked the source and am making an attempt at a lua target:
https://github.com/jdonaldson/haxe/tree/haxe_lua_rb1
It's been a great way to learn OCaml, and Lua. If you're interested in creating your own Haxe target, I'm hoping my commit log will be helpful.
We just released our second game in Haxe on iOS a few weeks ago and we're releasing the Android version in another 6 weeks. It's a Unity client with haxe-generated C# code and then javascript and node on the server. There have definitely been a bunch of hiccups and hitches along the way, but it's been pretty good overall.
Thanks! We had actually soft-launched before the cut-off, so we slipped in before that requirement got put in place. That said, we did just get it working with IL2CPP last week which was a few days of work for one engineer. More hiccups encountered but nothing show-stopping (though mostly in dealing with Unity's peculiarities than anything else).
I'm in the process of learning Haxe. I hope it becomes more popular since you can have macros, static type-checking and a shared code-base with one language. You can have all these things with Javascript but not at the same time (that I know of).
When you write Javascript, do you mean TypeScript, AtScript, something else? There's no type checking in JS, and there is no metaprogramming support in JS, let alone of the quality it can be found in Haxe.
Besides that, the type system of Haxe is far more expressive than those of most languages that also compile to JS. Ocaml, Scala and Haskell are the better known languages that are actual competitors in that regard.
Yes. "With Javascript" I mean via Typescript or Flow, you can have some static type-checking. You can use Sweet.js for macros with Javascript, but you can't use both of these tools together.
I'm unfamiliar with Ocaml, Scala and Haskell but OK.
I'm looking into potentially using Haxe as a way to share code between iOS and Android. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody has made a good, open source Objective-C/Swift target for it yet. (There is a Swift target here[0] but it hasn't been committed to since October 8 and doesn't seem production-ready by any means.) I would contribute one myself but I have no experience with OCaml, and don't currently have time to learn it.
I like the idea of this approach way more than the one that projects like Xamarin take (build a common runtime on top of each platform) because you don't incur any runtime overhead, and debugging would (in theory) be much easier because you can just debug the native language instead of needing to understand the extra VM layer on top. As a bonus, with Haxe you can also target the web, which you can't do with Xamarin/RoboVM/RubyMotion/etc.
Has anyone tried anything like this (not necessarily with Haxe) and had success with it?
I've been using haxe/openfl in production for 1.5 years and wouldn't really recommend it. Originally cross-platform code was a really good idea very few people had or executed well and haxe's warts were forgivable, today that's a capability many languages have without the hassle. I think the only unique value left in Haxe is outputting Flash.
Let's be careful not to limit Haxe to OpenFL, which the linked article isn't even using.
The article points out that Haxe is a great option for creating portable application logic while the game is using Unity for rendering.
Other uses for Haxe are the JavaScript target which a number of companies are using extensively in the same way you would be using typescript/coffeescript.
Regarding targeting the web, you can't do this directly with RoboVM, but you can use GWT to do so. This means that you can target Android, iOS, and web with Java. You would have shared code that all platforms could use, and then build the UIs natively.
This is pretty much the approach that Google use with Inbox, except they used j2objc instead of RoboVM.
Yeah, I agree that an Objective-C target makes more sense because it's more broadly useful (and Apple is still making backwards-incompatible changes to Swift). Thanks for the link!
If you have a critical bone in your body, prepare for a love/hate relationship. It is so good and yet so bad in various ways. I wrote a few unpublished games with 2.0 and NME back when (e.g. mzzl).
I agree. I've used haxe, and it's REALLY nice being able to cross-compile from one codebase, but there were several times it was more difficult than expected to get things to work. At this point I'd rather use C++ and just compile on different machines or in VMs. Or, since I'm looking at haxe from a gamedev perspective, I'd rather use Unity since it targets every platform haxe does, and has better docs (HaxeFlixel and HaxePunk are great, but apart from basic tutorials you're sailing without a compass or rudder - but this was about a year ago).
The sample program on the Haxe main page demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the value of dictionaries. Not exactly inspiring one to learn more.
class Test {
static function main() {
var people = [
"Elizabeth" => "Programming",
"Joel" => "Design"
];
for (name in people.keys()) {
var job = people[name];
trace('$name does $job for a living!');
}
}
}
It's a simple example, but it's showing a lot of nice things.
The "people" instance is using anonymous syntax for a Map type. Haxe's Map types are actually abstract types: http://haxe.org/manual/types-abstract.html. I doubt many developers are familiar with this type of feature.
For instance, here's a "packed array" implementation that lets me store an array of integers in a fraction of the space usually needed for a standard array type:
https://github.com/jdonaldson/packhx
Abstract types let me use the same api that standard arrays use (including array accessors), even if the underlying runtime implementation is completely different.
The other nice things going on in the example is the simple for loop using an iterator, and the nice string interpolation. Granted, this is nothing super sophisticated, but it's great to have these same features across all the targets that Haxe supports.
Haha, I was the one that wrote that example for the homepage. It was never meant to be a comment on the ideal data structures for different use cases. Rather it's just there to give developers a taste of the syntax: there's more semicolons and brackets than Python, less explicit typing than Java.
If you have an example of a better code sample for introducing language syntax, I'd love to see it so I can learn from it.
My point is that if you're going to iterate through the entire dictionary, there should be a way to get full key-value pairs, so you don't have to look up the value for each key. There's no need to change the entire example. Something like this:
for ((name, job) in people) {
trace('$name does $job for a living!');
}
We recently adopted it to provide a sane base to our Javascript. Personally, I LOVE it. It's cleaned up our code so much.
My problem with it is that it seems to have gone somewhat stale. It's been almost a year since the last update, and at least for the JS target, a number of the great external libraries never made the hop over to the 3.0 codebase.
Development hasn't stalled at all, neither for the JS target nor for most other targets. The core compiler is being improved constantly, which benefits all targets, and there have been improvements in the JS code generator, too (which isn't easy, the code quality has been very high, already).
Oh I definitely have nothing bad to say about Haxe. I was mostly just referring about some of the external libraries that never made the jump over from legacy, which could be indicative of developers jumping ship.
You make a great point; just because a project doesn't put out updates once a week doesn't mean it's stale. There are some other great projects like haproxy and redis that are clean enough and stable enough that regular updates aren't necessary.
I guess you sort of grow accustomed to that mentality when dealing with some other common OSS projects
Readit News
(at least it was for me...I was amazed at how fast Pope built and ported a cross-platform game considering he's a one-man shop...though to be fair, he was also able to learn Flash and build games for Ludum Dare competitions...so he's probably an outlier :) )
[1] http://www.openfl.org/
Another interesting thing to look at is the OCaml source for the Haxe compiler itself. https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe
At first, I was hesitant to do much with the compiler since I don't know OCaml. But, I recently forked the source and am making an attempt at a lua target: https://github.com/jdonaldson/haxe/tree/haxe_lua_rb1
It's been a great way to learn OCaml, and Lua. If you're interested in creating your own Haxe target, I'm hoping my commit log will be helpful.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world-zombination/id68062469...
Great looking game and near perfection on gameplay, idea, brand, art, assets, ui, icon etc. Flawless victory.
Here's a port of the jQuery TodoMVC for anyone wanting a quick example of what a web-target would look like. https://github.com/explorigin/todomvc-haxe
Besides that, the type system of Haxe is far more expressive than those of most languages that also compile to JS. Ocaml, Scala and Haskell are the better known languages that are actual competitors in that regard.
I'm unfamiliar with Ocaml, Scala and Haskell but OK.
I like the idea of this approach way more than the one that projects like Xamarin take (build a common runtime on top of each platform) because you don't incur any runtime overhead, and debugging would (in theory) be much easier because you can just debug the native language instead of needing to understand the extra VM layer on top. As a bonus, with Haxe you can also target the web, which you can't do with Xamarin/RoboVM/RubyMotion/etc.
Has anyone tried anything like this (not necessarily with Haxe) and had success with it?
[0]: https://github.com/ralcr/swift-target
Edit: Wording and clarification, added bit about targeting web.
Other uses for Haxe are the JavaScript target which a number of companies are using extensively in the same way you would be using typescript/coffeescript.
Could you speak to the specific "warts" you found while using it? I'm genuinely curious.
This is pretty much the approach that Google use with Inbox, except they used j2objc instead of RoboVM.
I think the focus is going to be on generating objective c, rather than swift. Although, that's the entire extent of my understanding.
The "people" instance is using anonymous syntax for a Map type. Haxe's Map types are actually abstract types: http://haxe.org/manual/types-abstract.html. I doubt many developers are familiar with this type of feature.
For instance, here's a "packed array" implementation that lets me store an array of integers in a fraction of the space usually needed for a standard array type: https://github.com/jdonaldson/packhx Abstract types let me use the same api that standard arrays use (including array accessors), even if the underlying runtime implementation is completely different.
The other nice things going on in the example is the simple for loop using an iterator, and the nice string interpolation. Granted, this is nothing super sophisticated, but it's great to have these same features across all the targets that Haxe supports.
If you have an example of a better code sample for introducing language syntax, I'd love to see it so I can learn from it.
My problem with it is that it seems to have gone somewhat stale. It's been almost a year since the last update, and at least for the JS target, a number of the great external libraries never made the hop over to the 3.0 codebase.
You make a great point; just because a project doesn't put out updates once a week doesn't mean it's stale. There are some other great projects like haproxy and redis that are clean enough and stable enough that regular updates aren't necessary.
I guess you sort of grow accustomed to that mentality when dealing with some other common OSS projects