Haxe (From: Java > Scala -> new thread: GUI for D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Adrian" <adrian.remove-nospam at veith-system.de> wrote in message 
news:jbhr5j$1n9t$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Yes it is - but did you ever tried haXe ? IMO it is the best cross
> platform language around - you target JavaScript, Flash, PHP, NEKO, C++
> and soon Java and C# with one language. Typesafe with type inference,
> compiled and code completion support from the compiler.

Haxe is great. The documentation isn't always so good, the language itself 
could admittedly be better (it absolutely pales in comparison to D, but 
then, so do most languages), but it's better than JavaScript, and it 
absolutely beats the SHIT of out of AS2 and PHP (as much as I hate JS, my 
hatred towards PHP, FlashIDE and AS2 is at least 10x that).

The main "real world work" project I've been working on for awhile has had 
requirements of Flash, and shared web hosting (which generally implies PHP). 
The Flash requirement is due to things that JS just can't handle well even 
now, and definitely couldn't have handled back at the project's start. Very 
early on, I switched development from PHP/AS2 to Haxe and have never looked 
back.

In that project, Haxe's ability to compile the same code, in the same 
language, down to both server-side (PHP) and client-side (Flash8) has been 
an *enormous* benefit. Just that one ability alone, even without the fact 
that Haxe beats the snot of out both AS2 and PHP. I also use a 
slightly-hacked version of the HaxeIgniter framework (could be better, but 
it's not bad and it gets the job done).

That said, I have been chomping at the bit to switch to D (and Adam's clever 
web framework) for my server-side code. I've pretty much managed to convince 
my client to eventually let us switch to a host that allows native-compiled 
CGI. The only problem now is that that would rule out the possibility of 
sharing code between both server and client - Which is *NOT* something I 
want to give up...

<shameless plug>:

So to that end, you mentioned Java and C# targets are coming to Haxe? Well, 
so is D... :)

HaxeD: http://www.dsource.org/projects/haxed

It's not at a usable point just yet, but the basics are in place, and at 
this point it's mostly just a matter of continuing to translate each of the 
different types of statements, expressions, declarations, etc. Details of 
the current status are on that homepage. (Haxe's macro system is a low 
priority for me right now though, unless someone else wants to work on 
that).

Why did I write the whole thing from scratch in D as a separate tool, 
instead of just adding D support to the official Haxe codebase? Ehh, 
possibly-questionable reasons:

1. Because I looked at Haxe's source and decided I didn't feel like figuring 
out OCaml before getting started :/

2. I already have a parsing framework in D ( 
http://www.semitwist.com/goldie/ ) and figured dogfooding would be a good 
idea.