[@'s for multiple replies: @xeiavica, @detergent1, @MSGhero]
At 5/18/25 02:28 PM, xeiavica wrote:Does it defeat the purpose of using flash if you're not going to use ActionScript?
I oscillate back and forth between being a retro purist and maximalist. Regardless, I think what the Flash community is trying to do is kind of unique within this space: they're trying to keep the platform viable, if niche. As a result, the Flash community uses the word "preservation" very differently than the rest of the retro community (if they should even be considered retro). They're not trying to "preserve" Flash games in the sense of giving you an accurate recreation of the experience circa 20XX. They're trying to keep the games playable and on even footing with other games written in other technologies. I think the distinction is subtle but important. You can see the proof in how non-traditional an "emulator" Ruffle is and where Tom puts his money. Ruffle doesn't let you pick a particular version of the Flash runtime to emulate, instead its more of a "fantasy" version that tries to play everything the best it can, even if that means most games run "better" than they would have back in the day. Similarly, Tom recently paid for gamepad support to be added to every Flash game on the site retroactively. That's a feature meant to keep Flash relevant/competitive not to preserve an experience that never really existed.
In that light, I don't see how using Haxe defies the spirit or purpose of using Flash. There's also the fact that unlike gamepad support, Haxe *was* there back in the day (2005). Loving Flash but hating Adobe is not a new thing. :) Hell, Haxe (or at least HEAPS) is practically a Motion Twin technology. Is anyone on this forum really gonna look you in the eye and say that Motion Twin of all people aren't a Flash developer? It's a silly idea.
And I was apparently wrong about not being able to use the Haxe in the IDE. I forgot about the "-as3" flag, which saves the transpiled ActionScript. I'm not sure if the flag is still supported in the absolute latest version of Haxe, but there are other ways, like JPEXS, to get to the ActionScript. Depending on how you set things up, using Haxe with a vintage IDE might be not be any harder than using an external text editor.
At 5/18/25 07:59 PM, detergent1 wrote:when I was looking at Haxe I wanted to know about its macro system (a few months ago), but at the time the documentation I tried to read was quite inaccessible and unhelpful, so I didn't bother and moved on and dismissed it :(
It's not really your fault. The documentation leans very heavily on the reader having previous experience, realizing the macro keyword is equivalent to the backtick in Lisp, and then skipping the rest of the documentation. In implementation though, it's a super impressive system. I've never seen anything so flexible for a language with this complex a syntax. If you really want to understand it, I hate to tell you learn Lisp first, but it certainly is helpful.
At 5/18/25 03:00 PM, MSGhero wrote:A lot of Tink is now core to Haxe's standard library, so I don't find it attractive anymore since there's so much overlap. There was a point years ago where I was quite into it, but now it's a lot of dependencies just for the one thing you need.
You're right about Tink being less needed nowdays. I literally meant that the code itself was beautiful. Just the beauty of the design trinity of Surprises, Promises, and Futures is mind blowing to me. I hope that before I die, I can do so much with so little.
