I'm also surprised that Neko has been posted here rather than HashLink, which is much more impressive:
- unlike Neko, the bytecode is strictly typed, allowing it to be much faster
- there are two different ways to use it:
- HL/JIT, compiling to bytecode and using the VM
- HL/C, compiling to raw C code to gain an extra bit of performance and allow it to run on devices that don't allow JIT (mobile / consoles)
- there is a VSCode breakpoint debugger for it (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=HaxeFoun...)
- in the future, support for hot-reloading bytecode is coming (https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/hashlink/issues/145)
Sorry, I found Neko for the first time and didn't see any mention of HL on the Neko website. HashLink does look very impressive so thanks for the details. I'm looking into it now.
That is a good point, a mention on the Neko website would make sense.
So how much faster is HashLink than Neko?
Are there any benchmarks somewhere?
Edit: It's significantly faster then Neko and about as fast as HXCPP target.
I thought the vscode debugger is for the JavaScript target, not the hashlink target (but it's been a while since I last looked, so I would be glad to be wrong).
There's actually VSCode debuggers for a lot of Haxe targets by now: HashLink, JavaScript [1], C++ (HXCPP), Eval (the compiler's macro interpreter) and Flash. See https://github.com/vshaxe/vshaxe/wiki/Debugging.
[1] Though in JavaScript's case, there isn't really anything Haxe-specific about it, it just uses sourcemaps generated by the compiler like other languages compiling to JS.
wow, that's pretty cool. I m really glad that vscode introduced the language server and debugging procotol.
Differences between Neko and Hashlink, why a new VM: https://haxe.org/blog/hashlink-indepth/
I mainly know Neko as one of many transpiling targets for Haxe programming language [2] (10+ targets including JS, PHP, C++), and have used it many years ago for all my backend stuff.
[1]: https://hashlink.haxe.org/ [2]: https://haxe.org/