[christoph]

We used this for a client game project - a Candy Crush clone, about 4 or 5 years ago successfully. The client wanted the game to run on browsers (HTML & Flash for older browsers), iOS and Android, with a fairly tight budget. Having done a lot of AS3, the learning curve was pretty low.

There were a reasonable number of specific things to learn about compilation, packaging and handling things like device rotation, viewport sizes, etc. along the way. But we had a cleanish single codebase for all targets.

Documentation and real world examples were fairly slim on the ground at that point, but it certainly worked and ran well to very well across all devices. It certainly offered a pretty consistent experience across all the targets and ran at a decent framerate on everything we tested against. We couldn't really find much to fault it on once we had everything up and running. I seem to remember compilation times being incredibly fast.

I'm kind of surprised it's still a thing - it brings back some good memories & makes me want to have a go with it again as it was an enjoyable way of working for that type of 2D game project.

[pvorb]

You mention only good things about Haxe. Why would you expect it to be gone by now?

[christoph]

I guess just because it seemed fairly niche, seemingly targeted mainly towards people making 2D games for cross platform use, around the same time things like Unity & UE became the hot new thing to be using for that type of game dev. People also seemed to look down on it's AS3 like syntax and there was a limited pool of people willing to commit large numbers of hours to working on it as part of their career path when Apple were bringing out new frameworks every year for doing things like AR, 3D, SceneKit, IAP, etc. It never seemed it could fully embrace the newer native abilities that everybody wanted to be working with while maintaining its ability to cross compile. I guess browser based gaming (Flash, Facebook games, etc.) kind of died at the same time as well.

We used to do lots of Flex development back then for various commercial projects, then Flash/AS3/Flex got all but abandoned overnight, becoming almost hated. We managed a large cross compiled (iOS/Android/Windows/OS X) AS3/Flex project with native hooks for various platforms up until mid last year, parts of the codebase were nearly 10 years old, when we finally managed to convince the client it would cheaper to re-write in a mix of HTML/JS/Electon/JS bridges than continue to battle the existing codebase. We rewrote it all in around two weeks, improved the UI and fixed long term numerous issues that had plagued us for at least a couple of years, mainly due to being reliant on closed source 3rd party Windows/Mac integrations/hooks that had been abandoned by the original developers and Adobe also largely abandoning the AS3 iOS/Android compiler.

Also, it didn't really seem to have a huge community and everything seemed to be in a transitory phase with things like Flash being pushed out by iOS native development, the huge improvements in HTML/JS/CSS, etc. Then tech like Swift, React, etc. came along it just seemed to get forgotten as a tool in our arsenal.

We certainly started focusing more on other new stacks/approaches around the same time.

[ciroduran]

This is a great retrospective, thanks

[maweki]

Because in terms of game engines, new engines that get much more publicity, like godot engine, exist. And as Haxe supported Flash when I played with it, I as well thought it was superceded by newer engines.

Half a decade is a lot in human years, let alone IT-years.

[vr46]

Haxe is, or was, used extensively in developing for 'smart' devices, like TVs, I know that either the inventor, Nicolas, or one of the senior Haxe people, was working for Massive Interactive a few years ago doing just this.

https://haxe.org/videos/conferences/wwx-2015/haxe-at-massive...

[k_]

I worked with them on that a few years back. I think they're still using haxe on some smart device projects but not all, sadly (easier to find devs with a typescript codebase..).

I don't think Nicolas worked with them, though. I'm one of Haxe contributors but I don't suppose you were thinking of me.