[VSCODE] Development workflow

#1

Hi there,
who is using Visual Studio Code?
I mainly develop little HaxeFlixel games and I need a fast development workflow.
On which platform do you test your projects? Html5? Flash? Neko?
And how do you debug your app?
I successfully set up the hxcpp debugger. It is working fine, with breakpoints and everything, but it is a nightmare to recompile everytime I change anything.

I prefer not to use Flash as my main develop platform because it has too many platform specific features. My primary targets are Windows, Android and maybe Html5.

So, what is your full speed development workflow?

Thank you,
Fil

#2

I use Visual Studio Code daily. I just open the folder of the project I’m working with, and the Lime extension helps enable support for code completion, and provides support for testing to one of the supporting platforms. On some systems I bound the “Run Test Task” keybinding to “Ctrl + Enter” to mirror my experience using FlashDevelop, but lately I mostly use the command-line in another window to build and run. That’s me jumping between lots of different projects.

I’d be interested in knowing how to set up the HXCPP debugger, I haven’t actually tried, I’m too used to trace/printf debugging I guess :wink:

HTML5 has a good debugger, which I use often for tracking down unexpected crashes or other issues. I also use the Neko target at times, as it may have a better stack trace when crashing than HXCPP. I (personally) avoid testing mobile most times due to the deployment time it takes.

Also, Lime should have a beta “-watch” parameter, which can help speed up some build-times, doing something like lime test neko -watch, to rebuild and relaunch the application after you make changes and save your source files. I’d love to see this workflow improve, the OpenFL NPM releases have a really good hot-reload workflow with Webpack for the browser.

#3

It’s pretty straightforward, the steps are in the readme: https://github.com/vshaxe/hxcpp-debugger#usage

#4

Debuggable platform are only hxcpp, flash and html5, right? I’d love to have full debug power, with breakpoints, watch and all the stuff.
I would go straight with hxcpp but recompiling time is killing me every time. It is supposed to take so long or maybe am I missing something?

I’d love to develop using HashLink, any news regarding Lime compatibility?

#5

We have alpha support in Lime, but it requires working from the Lime repository.

Like this:

1.) Download HashLink, and extract somewhere. I use “C:\HaxeToolkit\hl”

2.) Add “HLPATH” as an environment variable, so we can find it

3.) Use a dev version of Lime, and rebuild using -Dhashlink (if you use the source already, do a -Dhashlink -clean build)

haxelib install hxp
git clone --recursive https://github.com/openfl/lime
haxelib dev lime lime
lime rebuild windows -Dhashlink

Then lime test hl should work, but HashLink support requires additional testing, and the HashLink-enabled Lime NDLL requires “libhl” on all Lime native targets (including Neko and HXCPP) so this is why we don’t ship it in haxelib yet