On Sun, 2012-02-19 at 23:19 +0100, Niel Drummond wrote: > I don't recommend the approach of writing a separate javascript layer - > haxe has the concept of "untyped" code blocks, and a special Dynamic type, > which is extremely useful at getting around browser incompatibilities (I > think GWT has something similar). I don't think it makes sense to create a > javascript backend without this feature. When I looked into the idea of us simply porting Flex to haXe to solve the JavaScript-target issues, what you describe was one of the killer issues that made haXe a no-go.
haXe doesn't do anything clever to target the DOM and JavaScript-specific component libraries, thus if we followed the haXe approach, we'd end up with Flex trying to render via canvas elements. The canvas is far too slow in all browsers at present for this to be an option. Therefore I think with Flex our only choice is to do the complete opposite of haXe and to write JavaScript-specific renderers to replace all the skin classes in Flex. That is the only way we can hope to get good performance. David.
