When comparing Haxe vs Elixir, the Slant community recommends Elixir for most people. In the question“What are the most enjoyable programming languages for web development? ” Elixir is ranked 5th while Haxe is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Checks types at compile time
Pro Access native features of target platform
Whenever you need to use target specific code (e.g. there is no Haxe library or extern definitions), you can embed fragments as untyped code in your Haxe code.
Pro Transpiles to Javascript, PHP, Python and many other languages
Pro Dead code elimination
Removes unused types and methods during transpilation.
Pro Checks syntax at compile time
Pro Support multiple different platforms from one source
Pro Easy sharing of code accross multiple target platforms
Pro Provides an exit strategy for Flash developers through OpenFl
OpenFl is a library written in Haxe, that duplicates the Flash API, by providing a parallel implementation.
Haxe's syntax has a lot of similarities with Actionscript 3.
Flash developers can easily migrate their code to Haxe while still using and targeting Flash, in addition to unlocking all the new targets supported by Haxe / OpenFl.
Pro Great for concurrency
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Pro Great getting started tutorials
The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly.
Pro Powerful metaprogramming
Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself.
Pro Full access to Erlang functions
You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html
Pro Scalability
Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers.
More details can be found here.
Pro Great as a first functional programming language!
Pro Great documentation
Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal.
Pro Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP
All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love.
Pro Easy to download libraries
Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get
Cons
Con Deployment is still not as easy as it should be
Con Some design choices may seem strange
Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird:
Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end
or
receive do
{:hello, msg} -> msg
{:world, msg} -> "won't match"
end