About Speaker
Andy Li is a PhD candidate in the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. He is an experienced open-source software developer. He has been contributing to Haxe, an programming language that can be compiled to multiple target languages, for five years. He is interested in programming language theories as well as mobile user interface, interactivity, installation art and generative graphics.
blog: http://blog.onthewings.net/
twitter: https://twitter.com/andy_li
github: https://github.com/andyli
About the Topic
Many platforms officially support only one or two programming languages. Given no language is perfect, it is often that we have to develop for a platform using a language that we don’t like. With transcompilers, which are source-to-source compilers, we can write in a language we like, and then compile it to a language the platform officially support.
In this talk, I will present a few state-of-the-art transcompiler technologies (Haxe, Scala, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Dart, LLVM, GWT), with a focus on Haxe, a state-of-the-art open source programming language that compile to JS, Flash, Java, C#, PHP, C++, and Python. I will describe what they offer, how they impact coding-style and how to maintain “native” performance.