Evaluating the Haxe Programming Language - Performance comparison between Haxe and platform-specific languages

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of Haxe, a cross-platform programming language. By applying an experi-mental method and a statistical test, we measure and analyze the performance associated with compiling Haxe source code to five of its targets. We find a significant difference in performance between Haxe-compiled and target-specific language code on four out of five targets, two of which in favour of Haxe and two against it. Our findings are useful for developers who are consid-ering adopting the language with the intent of replacing their current development toolbox with it.