A Multiplatform Programming Language
By admin on Dec 7, 2008 in open source, Programming
haXe (pronounced as hex) is an open source programming language.
While most of the other languages are bound to their own platform (Java to the JVM, C# to .Net, ActionScript to the Flash Player), haXe is a multiplatform language.
It means that you can use haXe to target the following platforms :
- Javascript : You can compile a haXe program to a single
.jsfile. You can access the typed browser DOM APIs with autocompletion support, and all the dependencies are resolved at compilation time. - Flash : You can compile a haXe program to a
.swffile. haXe can compile for Flash Players 6 to 10, with either “old” Flash<8 API or newest AS3/Flash9+ API. haXe offers very goodperformance and language features to develop Flash content. - PHP : You can compile a haXe program to
.phpfiles. This enable you to use a high level strictly-typed language such as haXe while keeping full compatibility with your existing server platform and libraries. - NekoVM : You can compile a haXe program to NekoVM bytecode. This can be used for server-side programming such as dynamic webpages (using
mod_nekofor Apache) and also forcommandline or desktop applications, since the NekoVM can be embedded and extended with some other DLL. - C++ : Currently in testing, with the right build of haXe from Hugh Sanderson, you can now output your haXe applications to pure C++ source code, complete with makefiles.
The idea behind haXe is to let the developer choose the best platform to do a given job. In general, this is not easy to do because every new platform comes with its own programming language. What haXe provides to you is :
- a standardized language with many good features
- a standard library (including
Date,Xml,Math…) that works the same on all platforms - platform-specific libraries : the full APIs for a given platform are accessible from haXe
