When targetting Haxe JS in Haxe 3, the output is “modern” style, which means, to prevent polluting the global namespace or conflicting with other libraries, the output is wrapped in a simple function:
(function() {})()
Which is great. And if you place breakpoints in your code, using:
js.Lib.debug();
Then your browser will launch the debugger inside this Haxe context, and you have access to all your classes etc. But what if you want to fire up the browser’s JS console, and gain arbitrary access to something in your Haxe code? Because it’s all hidden inside that function, you can’t.
Unless you have a workaround, which looks like this:
class Client
{
@:expose("haxedebug") @:keep
public static function enterDebug()
{
js.Lib.debug();
}
}
What’s going on: we have a class, and a function: “enterDebug”. This function can go in any class that you use, really – it doesn’t have to be in Client or your Main class or anything.
The “js.Lib.debug()” statement launches the debugger in the haxe context, as described before. But the “@:expose” metadata exposes this function outside of the Haxe context. The string defines what we expose it as: rather than the default “Client.enterDebug()”, we’ll just have “haxedebug()”. And the “@:keep” metadata makes sure this won’t get deleted by the compilers Dead Code Elimination, even though we may never explicitly call this function in our code.
Now that we’ve done that, recompile, and voilà! You can type “haxedebug()” into the Javascript console and start fiddling around inside the Haxe context. Enjoy.