Haxe VS AS3 VS JS Comparison Chart

• razaina
  Aug 21, 2011 at 13:33

  Haxe kick ass ! nothing else to say !

• shaun
  Aug 21, 2011 at 13:48

  I'm curious, why would you state that AS3 doesn't have conditional compilation, serialization or reflection?

• Philippe
  Aug 21, 2011 at 14:19

  Haxe is many unique/richer features but your comparison chart isn't totally fair:
  - Flash has: reflection, AMF serialization, (some) conditional compilation and arrays generics, and arguably the best native XML support,
  - Javascript has: a few specialized typed arrays, JSON serialization.

  That said, imho, haxe problem really isn't about features - it's about (the lack of) strategy. But we already discussed it many times :)

• Benjamin
  Aug 21, 2011 at 18:14

  I agree with Phillipe, I like both Haxe and AS3. But we can't just compare them on features.

• Lexa
  Aug 21, 2011 at 19:23

  Hi,

  I am not sur about the need of strategy, must be an interesting discussion :)

  A few ideas:

  What about execution time, it should appear here right? Also the browsers and platforms they target
  There are sources available for haxe compiler but not as3
  The "community driven" aspect of haxe and js? And what about lisences?
  The creation dates and histories of these languages would be nice too...
  The learning curve when you do not know web dev?

  This chart is a very good initiative for a better communication!

• Eli Grey
  Aug 21, 2011 at 19:31

  JavaScript does have native iterators, ala __iterator__ generators, and ECMAScript 5 has native iterators via Proxies. JavaScript has native XML parsing and serialization support (E4X), and for normal ECMAScript in a browser, there's the DOM (DOMParser and XMLSerializer). As for "community-driven", I can hardly see how it's not. Development of ECMAScript is done over an open mailing list and wiki.

• Simon
  Aug 21, 2011 at 20:44

  I get more impressed by these kind of list from the community than by its maker :p

• oizo
  Aug 21, 2011 at 22:16

  Github project
  Javascript : 17597
  Actionscript : 921
  HaXe : 55

• Tom
  Aug 22, 2011 at 16:50

  How about:

  finally (as in try/finally): AS3 Y, JS Y, Haxe N

  When I noticed this was missing, I was shocked, so I skimmed through Haxe source to see what was used instead, say, for guaranteeing files get closed, and it looks to me like no guarantees were in place at all. Sorry no time to review to give a pointer to source code on this at the moment. It was some while back that I went through this exercise.

  No RAII that I could find, either. Exceptions are worthless without some way to guarantee cleanup (and the pain of writing cleanup calls twice everywhere is horrific).

  Or am I missing some feature in Haxe that handles this?

  I have other issues, too, but this is one of the most glaring, in my opinion.

• Lexa
  Aug 23, 2011 at 08:19

  And also

  Possibility to have the same laguage on the server side : as3 N, Js Y, haxe Y
  Share the classes with server side scripts : as3 Y (amfphp) js N haxe Y

• Dr. Benton
  Aug 23, 2011 at 10:25

  Another key feature is the popularity of a language, and the size of its community, as pointed out by @oizo.
  This is probably the biggest lack of Haxe : the technology is good and its cross-technology feature is unique, it "just" misses a big community like the one of Node.js for exemple, which is very dynamic and innovative, with its hundreds of modules.
  I don't know what could be done to increase Haxe popularity ; but it's the biggest feature to work on, imho.

• Charles Pritchard
  Aug 29, 2011 at 23:31

  Adobe's asc compiler was released as part of the open source Flex tools. The compiler can be used to compile JS into Flash. They also released an interpreter for the abc code, to run from console.

  Current JS implementations do have typed structures, such as the Typed Array semantics. That said, the JS spec does not. They're part of the WebIDL implementations included in most engines.

• Lann
  Sep 10, 2011 at 20:45

  I don't know if you're just trying to advertise Haxe, but whether you are or not, it's making me want to use it!

• haxe addict
  Nov 15, 2011 at 03:08

  yes nicolas you forget something...
  haxe has good features, and it's not necessary to forget others ones
  ...some come from targets,

  AS3 have

  reflexion via describeType and JSON avmlPlus
  serialisation via IExternalizable / BiteArray (AMF is serialization)
  AS3 can compile to iOS plateform android... Air target windows and Mac... Air apps are not native binary but platform are targeted
  AS3 have conditional compilation...
  there are example of AS3 running on serverside version of tamarin (a uggly gadget like Node.js)
  C++ code can be handled by avm2 via Alchemy and a lot of IR generator to llvm are developped... we can imaging java targeted to avm2 via gcc in near futur...
  what about native extension... haxe and AS3 via Air have both
  AS3 sound API come from community request ... a simple NO is too strong about community driven section..
  for each is basicaly an iterator over array and dictionnary
  ha and AS3 have native hashMap via Dictionnary

  ;)

• Sam
  Oct 12, 2012 at 19:52

  @Tom: finally (as in try/finally): AS3 Y, JS Y, Haxe N

  Did you check Haxe documentation http://haxe.org/doc/cross/exceptions

  So: AS3 Y, JS Y, Haxe Y

• ean5533
  Dec 14, 2012 at 23:14

  @Sam The documentation explicitly leaves out any mention of a "finally" mechanism. So no, Haxe does not have "finally" (or at least the documentation does not specify it).

• (you)
  Mar 31, 2020 at 05:17