Can you tell us how you got started with programming?
My parents brought me a ZX Spectrum clone with 48K RAM and BASIC for my 7th birthday. I’ve been programming since then.
I work in a game dev company called Plamee and we make mobile games. I was able to push Haxe there and we are using it very successfully for the game logic part.
Out of the various Haxe IDE’s available, which one do you use?
I was using Sublime Text for a long time, because I loved its simplicity and speed, however now I’m moving over to Visual Studio Code, as it provides some great productivity features. Me and Simon are currently working on improving support for those in Haxe.
What other software do you find vital while working with Haxe?
GitHub and Travis CI are really great for my open-source work.
What hardware you do you use?
I’m mostly using a Windows PC, but I also have a macbook (though I don’t like OSX, so I have Windows there too). At my job, I sometimes have to deal with Android and iOS devices since we’re developing games for them.
And what problem does Haxe solve for you?
For my job, my main reason to use Haxe was for its cross-platform abilities, of course. In general, I really appreciate Haxe’s powerful type system and configurable compile-time behavior through macros that allows me to write concise code and have small and efficient output, while still being safe.
Another great thing about Haxe is surely the community. Both devs and users are very smart, friendly and helpful, I really love to be a part of this.
Is there anything that ticks you off about Haxe, if anything? Lack of a feature? Something else?
I really miss null-safety and sometimes short-lambdas, but that’s not critical and can be implemented to some extent.
What compiler targets do you use?
For my work we use C# and JavaScript. For the open-source stuff, I try to get things working on all Haxe targets.
What platforms to do deploy to?
Mobile, Android and iOS.
What would you like to see added to the Haxe compiler?
Speaking of language features I’d appreciate null-safety, short-lambdas and tuples/destructuring. But the most needed thing right now IMO is more IDE support features.
It would be nice to see some advancement on the language side, but I agree, its currently not important.
What tips or resources would you recommend to a new Haxe user?
The new code cookbook resource by Mark Knol is really awesome found at code.haxe.org. And of course one shouldn’t forget the good old manual, which is really well written IMO.
The cookbook is a great addition, lets hope people will contribute to it like they did on old.haxe.org open wiki.
Are there any Haxe libraries or frameworks that you are impressed by and use?
I don’t use many libraries, but some really impress me, like Franco’s thx collection, Juraj’s tink libraries. Also, I really like the design of Rob’s Kha framework and I’d love to use it someday.
What is the best use of Haxe you’ve come across?
Can’t really say what is the best use, but I’m really impressed to see cross-platform frameworks that leverage multiple Haxe targets, especially new ones like Python.
What do you think of the Haxe Foundation?
I’m not sure what the foundation really means, so to me it’s just a group of core developers.
Where has the HF excelled in your opinion?
Moving to GitHub is obvious, but nevertheless the best choice for Haxe, which brought so many contributors! Also, Andy Li’s work on building and testing Haxe and related products (HaxeLib, Neko, etc) is one of the best things happened to Haxe.
Any areas you think the HF could improve?
Maybe communication within the team could be better. When I just joined the development, I was surprised that only so few developers are using the IRC channel.
What contributions are you proud of?
I mostly contribute small fixes and polishing everywhere, as well as dev-version QA so I can only be proud of these as a whole. If everything goes well, I’ll have a big reason to be proud soon, but let’s not talk about it for now. :)
Oh yeah, I forgot about hxnodejs, which seems to be greatly appreciated and used by a lot of people.
Do you use them in your projects? Which?
At work, we surely make use of the optimizations I’ve applied to the C# target.
Did your contributions bring you work opportunities?
Yeah, I’m getting mails from time to time. Once I even got an offer involving OCaml :-)
Tell us a little about your WWX talk?
I will make a short talk on how I managed to convince my company to use Haxe and how it worked out. This is going to be my first talk in public, and it’s in foreign language, so I’m a bit nervous.
I know people are looking forward to the talk, so good luck and try not to be nervous.
What is the best part of WWX for you/are you looking forward too?
Meeting like-minded people! \o/ Also visiting Paris :)