You make it sound like you actually experienced crashes due to an unstable sort function in Haxe.
You even make it sound like that was a common occurrence due to a deliberate decision on part of the development team to not fix that alleged source of crashes, but rather refer to an alternative in the documentation.
You should clarify that you haven't made this experience, and that no one you know or have heard of ever has.
You seem to have no idea how unlikely it is that the various Array.sort implementations (they're usually provided by the respective target platforms, of course) all have some bug that leads to crashes, moreover, you seem to be unaware that most target platforms provide such basic APIs, which in turn shows how little you know about Haxe.
As the documentation already explains, "unstable" in the context of a sort function is about the order of elements that are equal from the perspective of the comparison function. That's basic CS terminology. It's not about crashes, and it's not about bugs in Haxe or the respective target platforms.
You simply misunderstood, but you keep insisting. Which sheds some light on the overall quality of your comments about Haxe here.
In our case on Android Array.sort throws exceptions. Pretend I nominated something the success story developer had to learn some OCaml to fix in the Haxe compiler instead, it is just an example and doesn't change the common narrative.
Please report that bug. The core team (or other devs familiar with Haxe like myself) will be happy to fix it.
Also, consider that 65% of the code in the haxe git repository is written in Haxe, not OCaml. There's a lot you can change, extend or fix without knowing OCaml at all.
When you write Javascript, do you mean TypeScript, AtScript, something else? There's no type checking in JS, and there is no metaprogramming support in JS, let alone of the quality it can be found in Haxe.
Besides that, the type system of Haxe is far more expressive than those of most languages that also compile to JS. Ocaml, Scala and Haskell are the better known languages that are actual competitors in that regard.
Yes. "With Javascript" I mean via Typescript or Flow, you can have some static type-checking. You can use Sweet.js for macros with Javascript, but you can't use both of these tools together.
I'm unfamiliar with Ocaml, Scala and Haskell but OK.
Of course you have to learn the language the compiler is implemented in when you're hacking the compiler. That's not an inconvenience, it's a tautology.
When you take development time into account, GWT doesn't come for free. Yes, it's possible to compile Java to JS via GWT, but the toolchain is prohibitively slow. In contrast, the Haxe compiler is extremely fast.
Development hasn't stalled at all, neither for the JS target nor for most other targets. The core compiler is being improved constantly, which benefits all targets, and there have been improvements in the JS code generator, too (which isn't easy, the code quality has been very high, already).
Oh I definitely have nothing bad to say about Haxe. I was mostly just referring about some of the external libraries that never made the jump over from legacy, which could be indicative of developers jumping ship.
You make a great point; just because a project doesn't put out updates once a week doesn't mean it's stale. There are some other great projects like haproxy and redis that are clean enough and stable enough that regular updates aren't necessary.
I guess you sort of grow accustomed to that mentality when dealing with some other common OSS projects
You should try the nightly builds or compiling straight from Git. They are stable enough for many purposes (and if you report a bug chances are that its fix will soon be available) and you can take advantage of new features.
By the way, there's a new release planned for the next weeks.
You even make it sound like that was a common occurrence due to a deliberate decision on part of the development team to not fix that alleged source of crashes, but rather refer to an alternative in the documentation.
You should clarify that you haven't made this experience, and that no one you know or have heard of ever has.
You seem to have no idea how unlikely it is that the various Array.sort implementations (they're usually provided by the respective target platforms, of course) all have some bug that leads to crashes, moreover, you seem to be unaware that most target platforms provide such basic APIs, which in turn shows how little you know about Haxe.
As the documentation already explains, "unstable" in the context of a sort function is about the order of elements that are equal from the perspective of the comparison function. That's basic CS terminology. It's not about crashes, and it's not about bugs in Haxe or the respective target platforms.
You simply misunderstood, but you keep insisting. Which sheds some light on the overall quality of your comments about Haxe here.