If you followed the post about friend types or the discussion about that topic on the haXe mailing list started by Michael Baczynski, you may believe that friend types can be slow. This is true (we are talking about targeting flash 9 here) if you use a temporary variable to "cast" the friend instance, but there is a workaround for that.
haXe is an exciting new programming language, as well as a compiler and a framework, that can be used to build web applications and write code aimed at multiple platforms on an array of operating systems.