I am new to the Haxe community – considering using it for some cross platform apps.
I have some questions around the developer experience with Haxe.
I am used to developing in environments with rapid turnaround – change 3 files in a 1000 file project, hit run, and the app is running within a few seconds (usual stuff with incremental compiles, compilation daemons, blah, blah).
How does Haxie perform in such a scenario (assuming I am not compiling to something like a C++ target )? [for some context here I will be developing targetting the desktop, and will only compile to other targets at releases]
Perhaps this is considered “external” to Haxie, so part of a build tool ..?
Also, and this be dear to everyone’s heart (and a very open ended subject) – what about IDEs?
I see there is an IntelliJ and a Vs Code plugin for Haxe. Is either substantially better than the other? Or do people prefer other choices? [Note that I am not developing a game so I don’t need asset management beyond a few trivial things like language packs for internationalization, loading the odd config file, etc (there is a part of my app that involves game-like low level polygon rendering, but it’s only small)].
For desktop targets, I typically test and debug against the Hashlink target which is very fast to build and launch, being near instant. Performance wise, it’s fairly comparable to the C++ target, and perhaps faster when debugging is active.
Only when I’m ready to test deployment, would I switch to the C++ target.
I use a build of VS Code (Arch package code) similar to VSCodium, in that it’s VS Code compiled without the Microsoft telemetry and such. You might like to install the Haxe Extension Pack with VS Code.
I won’t argue it’s development experience is better than IntelliJ, I actually wouldn’t know. But VS Code is free and open-source, so it’s got that going for it.
I am used to developing in environments with rapid turnaround – change 3 files in a 1000 file project, hit run, and the app is running within a few seconds. How does Haxie perform in such a scenario?
From my experience, the compilation itself is pretty fast for most targets. C++ takes longer.
The experience isn’t as good as ecosystems with a hot reload story for rapid prototyping though.
Also, and this be dear to everyone’s heart (and a very open ended subject) – what about IDEs?
VSCodium (and any VS Code forks like Cursor) has been working mostly well for me. There are some edges like no monorepo support. But I think it works well for most cases.
)? [for some context here I will be developing targetting the desktop, and will only compile to other targets at releases]
