Introduction to the Haxe Language

The Haxe programming language is a very modern, high-level programming language. It is very easy to learn if you're already familiar with Java, C++, PHP, AS3, or any similar object-oriented language. More features of the Haxe language:

• general-purpose
• strictly-typed, with type inferencing
• compiled (to multiple language targets/platforms, including VM bytecode)
• lexically-scoped
• everything is an expression
• exceptions for error handling
• standard library includes modules specific to the target-platform, in addition to modules common to all targets
• supports object-oriented, generic, and functional programming
• familiar syntax
• Haxe the language is purposely kept fairly simple, elegant, and practical to accommodate compilation to the large number of different target platforms.

As the Haxe Language has been specially designed for the Haxe Toolkit, we have paid extra attention to its flexibility. As such, the language easily adapts the native behaviours of the different platforms you have targeted in your development project. This enables extremely efficient cross-platform development, ultimately saving time and resources.

See the Haxe Language Features Introduction for a tour of some major language features.

Hello World

The Haxe Programming Language was designed to be simple yet powerful. Its syntax largely follows the ECMAScript standard, but deviates where necessary. The following program demonstrates "Hello World" written in Haxe:

class HelloWorld {
    static public function main() {
        trace("Hello World");
    }
}

With Haxe installed and this program saved in a file called "HelloWorld.hx", this can be compiled from the command line, for example to JavaScript:

haxe --main HelloWorld --js HelloWorld.js

to JVM bytecode (a jar file):

haxe --main HelloWorld --jvm HelloWorld.jar

or HelloWorld.hx can be run directly by Haxe's built-in interpreter:

haxe --main HelloWorld --interp

Most Haxe code is organized in classes and functions, making Haxe an object-oriented language reminiscent of Java, ActionScript 3 and C#. However, Haxe has been designed with expressiveness in mind, yielding a powerful language through easily readable syntax.

See Introduction chapter in Haxe manual for more info.

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