All of you probably know that I practice and love Test Driven Development(TDD) and that I am advocating it wherever I can. But I didn’t start doing TDD by reading books or following tutorials, I just heard about it from fellow programmers and then I looked up everything I could find on Wikipedia and Google and tried to teach it to myself. So I learned TDD the hard-way, by myself with no-one looking over my shoulder, and I probably made every mistake possible while doing so.

Welcome to the third post of my Learn haXe - the hard way series. In cased you missed one of the previous posts you can find them here. This time we are going to talk about a little gem in the haXe language called structure types and are incredibly useful.

In the second post of my series Learn haXe - the hard way we will have a look at “extension methods” and why they are the best thing since sliced bread. Check also my first post on “partial function application” which is a similar concept and might actually be used behind the scenes to enable “extension methods”.

This is the first post in my series: Learn haXe - the hard way where I will shed some light on various topics around haXe. It’s called “the hard way” because that is the route I am taking myself to learn haXe: Diving extensively into every little feature, disassembling and reassembling it until I fully understand how it works and what its use cases are.

Let’s just dive into the first topic: partial function application! It might be useful to read up some background information on functions in haXe in a previous post.

When you are an ActionScript 3 developer, like me, you might wonder while reading the title of this post: Function types? They’re just typed as Function! Oh, and types? Plural? There is only one kind of function in my code! That might be true for ActionScript, also JavaScript but in haXe you have a lot more information about your functions and more control over the type of them.

The haXe type-system might be one of the biggest differences to ActionScript 3 whereas the rest of the language and especially it’s syntax is very similar. To fully understand function types in haXe we first have to cover some ground on the haXe type-system itself and it’s features like type inference.