melange VS haxe

Hey HN, at Ahrefs we have been working on an online book that hopefully helps React developers get up and running with Melange, an OCaml to JavaScript compiler. You can read more about Melange here: https://melange.re/.

There are still a few chapters that we'd like to add before considering it "complete", but it might be already helpful for some folks out there, that's why we decided to publish it early.

The book uses Reason syntax to implement React components using ReasonReact components. You can read more about both in:

https://reasonml.github.io/

In my previous post on trying to use the NextJS App Router and Reason I described some of the problems and limitations of their compatibility with one another. With the release of Melange 2 I decided to see if the new features of Melange 2 could help to increase the compatibility of Reason and the NextJS App Router. I have also documented some of the things learnt after trying Melange (v1) with Astro and Remix.

So it's Reason, not ReasonML which the umbrella project's name, and Rescript is a imcompatible syntax split from the Bucklescript team (that previously transpiled Reason to JS). Bucklescript's new name is... Rescript.

But not everyone agrees with the split and work is being done on Melange to replace Bucklescript : https://github.com/melange-re/melange

Ultimately JsOfOcaml can directly transpile Ocaml to JS.

In reality, most folks that developed BuckleScript frontends with ReasonML switched to ReScript syntax and are happy with it. Some felt more friction because of their reliance on PPXes or FP-heavy libraries (like Relude) and those people tend to use the Melange fork of BuckleScript or they switched to js_of_ocaml.

There is a fork of ReScript that supports ReasonML syntax and with the goal of maintaining Ocaml compatibility: https://github.com/melange-re/melange.

There's also a fork of BuckleScript/ReScript called Melange that guts its build system so that instead of using ninja, it works with more standard tools for the ecosystem, specifically dune and esy. In doing so they managed to also finally get the compiler off of OCaml 4.06: now it can use a newer OCaml compiler and take advantage of four years worth of language and compiler improvements.

For OCaml and ReasonML your options are js_of_ocaml (mentioned here in ReasonML docs) or a fairly new fork of BuckleScript called melange. They differ in implementation and output, with JSOO taking intermediate bytecode generated by ocamlc and turning it into unreadable JS, vs Melange being a patched compiler that builds more human-readable JS.

Haxe compiles to a lot of languages. Some of those language targets are better maintained than others. I've definitely had situations where some usage of esoteric Haxe features (like, deep/complex generics alongside runtime polymorphism) compiled fine to one target but compiled to invalid code on another.

(Interestingly, in my experience the C++ target is rock solid. Though that experience is from many years ago.)

In any case, the best source for known compiler bugs is always gonna be GitHub:

https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is...

"Flash went away faster than a replacement emerged."

Not really how it looks to me: https://haxe.org/

This remineds me of Haxe[1]. I like Wax better because of the Common-Lisp-like syntax.

[1]: https://haxe.org

I thought this was a three.js demo but it's actually built with a language called haxe [1]. I've never heard of this language before and looks really cool. Makes me want to play with it!

[1] https://haxe.org/

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, ... .

For those interested in cross platform game development, don't forget https://haxe.org/! The usefulness / popularity ratio is very high on this one :).