Haxe vs Rust

Haxe allows you to develop for Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux and others, all at once, without the need to switch languages and maintain separate code bases.

This is possible because Haxe can compile to JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash AVM bytecode, C++, Neko, PHP, C# (.NET) and Java.

Support for even more platforms and languages is under development.

The language was designed to be very expressive with the smallest possible amount of syntactic sugar. There are actually fewer keywords than other languages with similar power.

Haxe can easily compile over 100,000 lines of code to JS in seconds on a mid-spec computer.

The language is very easy to learn for those with background in JavaScript or ActionScript 3.

Haxelib (common library repo) and other sources contain large codebases for anything from cryptography to communications. A lot of these are fully cross platform and work with the JavaScript target.

The JavaScript target can be used for everything from node.js server applications (with code completion) to games using either the Flash-like OpenFL library or direct canvas or WebGL programming.

Haxe has been around for more than 10 years (since 2005) and whilst not the most popular project, has had continuous growth.

Highly unlikely to disappear or for support to stop.

Friendly community

One big advantage over pure javascript, (or some other languages listed here) is that Haxe will pick up a whole range of errors when you compile, saving you the pain of having to try and debug them later. This includes everything from syntax errors ("Unexpected ;") to type errors ("Class user has no field username. Suggestion: username").

Code completion is built into the compiler and available to the IDE allowing for much smarter code completion that can actually parse and understand the syntax tree.

The output that is generated can be trimmed using "dead code elimination" to only include those functions and libraries that are strictly necessary. All code is very readable with only minimal extras for specific functionality.

Small output is good for frontend development as file size is a major concern.

After a type is inferred from its context, it cannot be changed to a new type, and type safety is done at compile time so it stays safe without the extra maintenance required for static typing.

Syntactic macros allow you to extend compiler features at the syntax tree step. Macros come into play after code is parsed into the abstract syntax tree, and macros allow you to transform it before the rest of the compilation completes.

This provides for immense power, while at the same time scoping the extensibility at a level that is powerful, but well constrained.

You can use the same classes on the server as you do on the client where applicable. This saves a lot of time.

Haxe has the ability to use "externs". These are haxe files which describe the usage of existing JS libraries. Get code completion and compile-time-checking for everything from jQuery to Node.js.

Even without externs, native JS code can still be used through untyped code.

Haxe has the power and expression to not need the npm dependancy hell that is common in js and typescript, bit it's still simple.

Using a remoting proxy you can get type safe server to client communications, allowing for remote method execution on the server as if they were part of the client side code.

Package tree is just directory tree, it's wonderful!

Haxe supports conditional compilation, so depending on compiler flags Haxe will include or exlcude sections of your code. Making it easy to have debug and release builds.

You can define constants in an abstract enum and when used in a switch/case statement Haxe checks for exhaustiveness, making sure every constant is covered - with no runtime implication.

Haxe compiler will check types when using externs for existing libraries.

You should use externs when calling non Haxe code, but if you just need to call one or two external JS functions, you can skip type checking by calling untyped code.

Since Rust is statically typed, you can catch multiple errors during compile time. This is extremely helpful with debugging, especially compared with dynamically typed languages that may fail silently during runtime.

Rust uses LLVM as a backend, among other things this allows Rust code to compile down to machine languages. This allows developers to write programs that run as efficiently as possible.

Unique ownership system guarantees a mutable data to be owned and mutated by only one thread at a time, so there's no data race, and this guarantee is checked at compile time statically. Which means easy multi-threading.

Of course, immutable data can be shared among multiple threads freely.

You don't have to write same array and dictionary classes hundreds and thousands times for strong type check by compiler.

Rust has built-in support for concurrency.

Since Rust 1.8 you can install additional versions of the standard library for different targets using rustup/multirust.
For example:

$ rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Which then allows for:

$ cargo build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Rust is a modern programming language written around systems. It was designed from the ground up this way. It's language design makes developers write optimal code almost all the time, meaning you don't have to fully know and understand the compiler's source code in order to optimize your program.

Furthermore, Rust does not copy from memory unnecessarily, to give an example: all types move by default and not copy. Even references to types do not copy by default. In other words, setting a reference to another reference destroys the original one unless it's stated otherwise.

When you identify a part of your code which gets repeated often, which you cannot abstract using functions or classes, you can use Rust's built-in Macros.

Cargo is the official package manager for Rust. It comes with the language and downloads dependencies, compiles packages, and makes and uploads distributable packages

While not as verbose as Java, it still is much more verbose than languages like Go and Python. This means that the code is very explicit and easy to understand.

The biggest community contributing to language.

Very easy to create functional with some additional from structure application.