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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

The Haxe programming language (https://haxe.org/). It's insane how unpopular this is compared to its value.

"Haxe can build cross-platform applications targeting JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, JVM, Python, Lua, PHP, Flash, and allows access to each platform's native capabilities. Haxe has its own VMs (HashLink and NekoVM) but can also run in interpreted mode."

It's mostly popular in game dev circles, and is used by: Nortgard, Dead Cells, Papers Please, ... .

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I’ll second this by saying I am currently building a game with Kha, a low level rendering Haxe library that targets all major platforms including consoles. I am utilising the extremely performant 2d immediate mode api which is refreshingly minimalist and exceptionally well designed.

Kha is awesome! I'm using it for https://rpgplayground.com

Wow that is really impressive! What other libraries are you using. And do you have you have much experience with using the non-web targets?

I'm also using box2d for collisions and simple physics. And the rest is custom written.

No experience with other platforms yet. Probably iOS will follow at some point, but I want it to be more feature complete first.

Nice. Zui is a library worth checking out if you haven’t already :)

Second time I see Haxe mention. I have had a ‘google’ (with Brave search) but I am still wondering why. Is it just the multitude of platform or is it something like: ergonomics, flexibility, productivity, tooling, ecosystem, production readiness, etc etc

It stands out because of the multiplatform targets. There is nothing comparable as far as I know.

For the rest it's a very nice language with the usual tools.

The multiplatform part is probably why it's so popular with game developers, since you can target so many client plaforms with only one codebase.

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