Peter Althainz wrote:
Dear All,
I'm happy to announce release 0.2.1 of HGamer3D, the game engine with Haskell API, featuring FRP based API and FRP based GUI. The new FRP API is based on the netwire package. Currently only available on Windows: http://www.hgamer3d.org.
Nice work! Of course, I have to ask: what influenced your choice of FRP library in favor of netwire instead of reactive-banana ? Best regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com Hi Heinrich good question, actually I need to thank you for your excellent tutorials on FRP and GUI on the WEB. I tried the version of reactive-banana without switches as the first FRP framework to have contact with and I liked its simplicity and the cool introduction around Excel cells you gave on the Web. HGamer3D is my personal way to get more insight into FP and Haskell especially and from the beginning I wanted to have a FRP API to try it with game examples. So your intro on FRP and the examples were very helpful with that. After reading a lot on the web it became clear, that currently reactive-banana and netwire are good candidates to start with. So why in the end I decided to use netwire for the binding? It's some personal things and I do not claim to have done a proper evaluation or comparison. I also cannot judge on performance or other relevant topics. Having said that, I can give you some points why I choosed netwire: - The cool simplicity of reactive-banana API seems to have suffered a little bit after the introduction of the switch functionality. - After getting around Monads and Applicative by great help of "Learning a Haskell for great good" I was shocked to see, there is even more to learn, when I detected Arrows. So I started to look at it and discovered some nice tutorials for Arrows. - What struck me was introduction of netwire author Ertugrul Söylemez on Arrows and the explanations of local state, which can be kept into an arrow. Since I was also curious on OOP and FP and game state handling, actually this raised some interest. So I think this "Arrows keep local state" argument was the killer feature. But also behaviours keep local state and maybe I got misguided here. - I then did some trials with netwire and I felt it's a quite comprehensive and nice API, so I got started with that. regards Peter