# Haxie Newb questions -- The Developer Experience
**URL:** https://community.haxe.org/t/haxie-newb-questions-the-developer-experience/4740
**Category:** Haxe
**Created:** [December 29, 2025, 10:13pm UTC](https://community.haxe.org/t/haxie-newb-questions-the-developer-experience/4740 "2025-12-29T22:13:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@commonwomble](https://community.haxe.org/u/commonwomble)
#### Post date: [December 29, 2025, 10:13pm UTC](https://community.haxe.org/t/haxie-newb-questions-the-developer-experience/4740/1 "2025-12-29T22:13:27Z")
Hi
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)].
thanks
CW
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### Author:  [@Bink](https://community.haxe.org/u/Bink)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2025, 2:10am UTC](https://community.haxe.org/t/haxie-newb-questions-the-developer-experience/4740/2 "2025-12-30T02:10:41Z")
Welcome to the community @commonwomble 😃🎉
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](https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/code/)) similar to [VSCodium](https://vscodium.com/), in that it’s VS Code compiled without the Microsoft telemetry and such. You might like to install the [Haxe Extension Pack](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vshaxe.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.
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### Author:  [@gravityWall](https://community.haxe.org/u/gravityWall)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2025, 1:21pm UTC](https://community.haxe.org/t/haxie-newb-questions-the-developer-experience/4740/3 "2025-12-30T13:21:03Z")
> 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.