Haxe Roundup № 308

This last week has had some pretty impressive posts, libraries and game releases.

Sven Bergström has written, to date, the single best description of Haxe is in his post Haxe from 1000ft.

Haxe is an extremely versatile toolkit for cross platform and cross target development (more on this soon). It is a tool that fits many uses which by nature makes it very hard to pinpoint it to a list of "What is it" or "What is it for". It's difficult to say - because you can do basically anything using it.

Sven has written a comprehensive introduction to the Haxe toolkit, giving concise descriptions of every part of the toolkit, the compiler, the language, the standard library, target specifics, the generated output and everything in between and beyond. If you've been struggling to put Haxe in a box, you have to read Sven's post.

Justin Donaldson has started experimenting with a new Haxe target, with a Ocaml backend, targeting Lua. It's early days, but this might result in Oleg's work being combined into Justin's Ocaml backend. It's one to watch.

Dan Korostelev has written Please Haxe, give me Null Safety. Dan is part of the compiler team, but one thing that constantly bugs him is that there is basically no null safety in Haxe.

What I would like to see in Haxe 4 very much is strict separation between T and Null<T>, which means that one CANNOT assign or compare T with null AND one cannot implicitly unify Null<T> with T.

Lars Doucet has written Game Maker, Security and Freedom in which he warns people of relying too much on proprietary tools and promoting the tools and frameworks built on top and around Haxe.

I've since joined the OpenFL team and we're currently working on extending OpenFL's CPP export functionality to support game console targets, but that's not done quite yet.

That statement isnt quite true any more as Lars has successfully gotten Lime / OpenFL compiling and rendering on the WiiU.

And proof of Haxe's versatility, World Zombination has been released worldwide on iOS which was possible because of Haxe and Unity3D working so well together. Congratulations to the Proletariat Inc team. Oh, here's some proof they used Haxe and Unity3D.

Tom Byrne has updated his Composure library with Promises. Checkout Tom's article Promises in Haxe Composure on their behaviour and future features.

After learning recently that Lubos Lenco was using my Composure library as the foundation of his impressive ZBlend game framework, I decided to add a few more really helpful features.

So we have Zblend which combines the Kha framework with Blender into a single experience, as well as having Photoshop and Sublime Text support.

We also have NanoFL which is a new “free vector and animation editor” written in Haxe targeting Javascript “wrapped into a standalone application through Mozilla's XulRunner project”. It also includes a Flash CS5+ converter, which is written in Haxe targeting Neko AND it also supports TypeScript! You have Yaroslav Sivakov to thank for all of this awesome.

This tool by Djoker Soft call SpriteGen is Haxe related in that you can consume its output. SpriteGen is able to output sprite sheets from 3D animations, checkout the video below.

Slava Tretyak has released two experiments in which test the particle emitters of Luxe Engine and OpenFL. The Luxe Engine demo takes some time to start, so give it a second.

And to finish off this weeks roundup Boyan Ololoevich has released the video how to setup IntelliJ IDEA for Haxe plugin development.