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From: "David Arno" <david@davidarno.org>
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Subject: RE: ActionScript and Apache Flex
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:14:02 -0000
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--Original Message-----
> From: Tink [mailto:flex@tink.ws ] 
> Sent: 12 January 2012 19:12
> 
> This could be a crazy idea, but how about us moving to Haxe? 
> This has an active OS community, compiles to multiple platforms already
meaning 
> that Flex wouldn't be dependent on Adobe anymore.

I looked into this before Christmas; I even spent time trying to improve
existing AS3 -> haXe tools so that they could "compile" the existing Flex
source. I did so as haXe already has support for compiling to JavaScript, in
many ways it's a better language and it's compiler is fast. However my
conclusions were that it would be a bad idea overall.

The advantages that haXe could bring us (better language; faster
compilation) are now things we can add to the Falcon compiler when we get
our hands on it. I think it would look odd to the wider community if we
walked away from our own compiler (and Flex's current language) to adopt a
relatively unknown language. Further, haXe doesn't support custom
namespaces, private or internal (its private keyword is the equivalent of
AS3's protected.) It doesn't support E4X notation. It doesn't have a base
Object type. It has block scope on variables when AS3 doesn't. It has the
weirdest way of doing getters & setters that I've ever seen (some folk love
them; I personally hate them.) Last, but by no means least, haXe doesn't
have a mxml equivalent. Converting the Flex source to haXe would not be a
trivial task.

I think the idea was worth exploring as it's not as crazy an idea as some
might think. However, having looked into it, I decided it wasn't really as
attractive an idea as I'd hoped.

David.