Blog
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Posted on Aug 14 2010
I'm please to announce on behalf of the whole haXe compiler team that the 2.06 release of haXe is now available on http://haxe.org/download !
The main changes in 2.06 are :
- metadata support, see http://haxe.org/manual/metadata
- allow custom haXe serialization, see http://haxe.org/manual/serialization
- allow to directly access the classes in SWF libraries in Flash9, and also allow several
-swf-libparameters - flash9+ now use native Xml parser : a lot faster, but more strict with namespaces
- improvements in code generation for PHP and C++ platforms
httpssupport in haXe/PHP- a lot of bugfixes and improvements on all platforms
See the whole list of changes here : http://haxe.org/file/CHANGES.txt
Enjoy !
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Posted on Aug 09 2010
I went already to SanFrancisco earlier this year and since I'm quite busy with my daily work at Motion-Twin I wasn't really sure about going to another conference this year.
However, nice people from Influxis have been invited me for FITC San Francisco as part of their Voodoo Lounge in-conference so I'm very happy to talk here about Everything you wanted to know about haXe, but were afraid to ask, make sure to attend if you're coming to FITC, and if you're not, they will be a live streaming of the talks.
No reason for you not to watch then ;)
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Posted on Jul 22 2010
I often - at least once a year - go to Flash conferences to talk about haXe
A lot of ActionScript developers are interested in giving haXe a try, but the main reason for not giving it a try is because of (lack of) IDE support.
Back in the old days, it was hard to switch between languages because of the need to adapt to a new syntax and to the changes in standard library. Since you needed to remember all the API, you were spending most of your time switching between your code editor and the API documention.
Today, IDE completion is very useful and will help you to learn/discover the API of a new language. With a good syntax support, you'll also avoid most of the troubles getting used to a new syntax. But while on one hand a good IDE will help you discover new languages, on the other hand switching to another IDE or (even worse) back to a bare text editor is very hard for some developers.
This is one of the many reasons why IDE support is important for haXe.
In order to ease IDE integra...
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Posted on Apr 12 2010
For those that haven't been following recent news, Apple changed their iPhone Apps Developers requirements by only allowing Objective-C (and a few other) languages to be used to write such apps.
What seems to be a move to prevent Adobe from integrating iPhone target in their upcoming CS5 release since it directly compiles AS3 to ARM through LLVM is actually annoying much more people than Flash fanatics, since many developers are using other languages for iPhone dev.
According to some people on the haXe mailing list, it seems that haXe for iPhone is safe since Apple would only want to ban people avoiding going through XCode compiler, which would also make platforms such as Unity safe.
I'm personally not surprised by Apple stance, since I've always seen their products as a beautiful and nicely designed lock-in, with very low level of interoperability and openness, everytime justified for the supposed sake of the "end user experience".
What makes me more surprised is that a lot...
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Posted on Mar 12 2010
I was presenting haXe at the FlashGamingSummit on Monday, that was a nice one-day conference and my first time in SanFrancisco. I'm currently attending the GDC which is also quite interesting.
I tried to focus my talk on haXe from the point of view of flash game developers. Being one myself, I think there's many reasons why haXe is perfectly suited for such a task, performances being one of them.
The Kube demo I was showing is an actual game that's been released on http://kube.muxxu.com (sorry, french only so far) and that is using a realtime raytracing engine running in Flash with low-res old school looking textures.
Here's a screenshot of the actual game :
You can download my slides in you want to have a glance at what I was presenting :
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Posted on Feb 14 2010
I was just looking at my emails archives. Actually we installed our IMAP server at Motion-Twin by the end of 2005 so I almost have all my sent/recv mails from this time. More than four years of words, and so much energy (and time) spent while writing them...
November 2005 was also the time that we started a private mailing list with the main people of OSFlash. It was including OSFlash cofounders - Aral and myself - as well as people working on the big projects at this time : John Grden, Chris Allen, Dominick Accattato and Luck Hubbard from Red5, and Edwin van Rijkom from Screenweaver.
We started discussing about a possible OSFlash Manifesto which would act as a foundation for the newborn and growing OSFlash community.
Here was my original take on the Manifesto :
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 12:05:02 +0100 From: Nicolas Cannasse <ncannasse@m.....com> Subject: [Roundtable] Manifesto RFC The OSFlash Manifesto --------------------- Fifteen years ago, there was no Web. Nothing. The WWW pr...
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Posted on Feb 03 2010
I'm trying every year to speak at least at one international conference. Attending to a conference is a good way to keep me updated with what's happening in the real outside world, and I also like to talk about my work while I'm there ;)
I don't have much free time, I dislike airports, and I'm married : three good reasons why I'm also limiting a bit my involvement within the "conference loop" compared to some of my good Flash friends which are doing something like five (or more) conferences a year.
Since I like to meet new people and learn new things, I think it's best to go as much as possible to different conferences. This year I will be very happy to speak about haXe at the Flash Gaming Summit conference which takes place in San Francisco next month !
This is a bit a side-event of the bigger Game Developer Conference 2010 so I'm sure I'll have a lot of fun there, and meet people that want to hear more about how to develop Flash games with haXe.
EDIT : I decided to the sta...
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Posted on Jan 26 2010
The haXe community is having an IRC meeting on Thursday 28, make sure to make it if you want to know more about haXe and different ways you can use it !
All details about the meeting are published here : http://haxe.org/com/meeting
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Posted on Jan 22 2010
In case you don't know about it, Sfxris a very nice library used to general sound effects, perfectly suitable for independent game developers :)
Sfxr was then ported to AS3, which was itself ported to haXe
I wanted to use it for one of my projects, but I was not very happy with the way it worked for Flash9 : you had to load a SWF (containing a sound and generated in-memory) each time you wanted to play a sound.
So I modified a bit the code in order to create a SWF that contains a
Sfxclass extending which is binded to the sound data. This way you can now :- build a SWF from wave bytes
- load it using
Loader.loadBytesinto a new emptyApplicationDomain - retrieve the
Sfxclass - create a
flash.media.Soundinstance - cache it for further usage
The code uses some static data to define the AS3 class. I could have done it manually by using the haXe Format Library which have full SWF+ABC support but I didn't want to add one more dependencies so did something more simple instead.
Here's the source code fo...
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Posted on Jan 21 2010
Some people often ask me what are the advantages of haXe in terms of speed.
Of course, there are many runtime optimizations in haXe that make your program run faster, but one of the very important thing to me is also the speed of the compiler. Compiling quickly help you to test some minor changes more often, to find and fix errors faster, and prevent you from losing your concentration and your time waiting for the compiler to be done with its work.
So what about comparing haXe and AS3 compilers speed ?
First, haXe starts with an obvious disadvantage : because it has type inference, structural subtyping and generics, the compiler needs to perform much more type checks that in more classical type system such as AS3 one.
But let's see how it rates anyway.
I tried the following : compiling the whole hx-format library, which is 64 files / 10.000 lines / 300KB of haXe to Flash9. Here's the commandline for that :
time haxe -swf9 format.swf -cp hxformat/tests/all All.hx
On my QuadCore (haXe co...
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