DISQUS

James Hofmann · 7 months ago

I have been developing Flash games in haXe since mid-2007. It is a very strong language and compiler, but I think Adobe will opt to ignore it because of a conflict with their business goals; if it is easy for a developer to compile on both Flash and other platforms, the monopoly on the Flash toolchain is weakened. Adobe has historically stayed just open enough to retain its market share, albeit the more powerful and influential the Flash platform becomes, the more likely it is that strong open-source competition will appear. Nobody was going to spend that effort when all Flash did was play video and animations, but now that it's trying to be a serious application platform, the motivations are all different.

Ben Garney · 7 months ago

I think having versions of Flash CS and Flash Builder that could target a variety of platforms would be very exciting, and motivate more sales of their tools.

They're not making any money off the player or the SDK. But allowing the toolchain to be leveraged in more places seems like a brilliant way to grow sales.

Josh Engebretson · 7 months ago

Nice to see you giving haXe some love Ben. I knew you would come around ;) Of course, you have completely valid concerns about it... especially, from a technology provider's viewpoint.

yuku · 6 months ago

I have some suspicion that Adobe is very, very afraid to make AS3 more complex than it is now. The more complex AS3 becomes, it will become more similar to C#. And why I think Flash is still the choice even though there is Silverlight, is because the programming language is much more friendly to developers without computer science degree or those geeks.

Ben Garney · 6 months ago

Adobe could do a lot worse than integrating Mono and supporting C# in the player.

But the main benefits of integrating Haxe (better performance, compile to other targets) do not require any changes to AS3. Of course HaXE itself has lots of nice new language features, but most of its wins are independent of those.

timtiny · 5 months ago

Flash has nothing to fear from Silverlight, because the flash toolchain can run under Linux, but would there even be mxmlc for Linux without Haxe?

Doubt it.

Haxe is actually a much simpler language than AS3. C# is just silly.

Ben Garney · 5 months ago

Personally, I would prefer C# among the three of them. It has the biggest dev community and the best tools. It is the most mature.

AS3 is doing ok, but has some growing up to do. HaXe has poor tool support and weird syntax, but great language features.

SparK · 4 months ago

I wonder if HaXe guy isn't sterested in making kind of a AS3 compiler
something that simply get my AS3 code and makes it faster.

that way we can get more performance without having to learn yet another language.
(nothing against haXe but 2 different languages in 1 single project is not what i want)

tarwin · 2 weeks ago

There's a few small differences that mean that you can't really just convert AS3 to haXe, but you can convert haXe to AS3! The main thing is that you can use any code written in haXe in AS3 anyway, so why not make your library in haXe, especially if you're making something that people just hook into.

We've been using haXe for over 6 months now and can't believe we hadn't been using it for years! It's amazing, for Flash, PHP and Javascript dev.