Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
[[Perhaps, if this thread continues, it is time to move to a nice -café at the corner.]]
Timothy Docker:
Has anyone considered writing a haskell wrapper for SDL - Simple Directmedia Layer at http://www.libsdl.org ?
This is a cross platform library intended for writing games, and aims for a high performance, low level API. It would be interesting to see how clean a functional API could be built around such an imperative framework.
Yes, SDL is a very interesting library, I wrote a wrapper for part of it a while ago: http://www.science.uva.nl/~kort/sdlhs/ It's far from complete and I have no plans to work on it. But for trying out graphics stuff it's very useful, mainly because you can understand the whole thing, fix it if it breaks down: make some change and recompile the whole wrapper in a minute or so.
Ammmmm...... I didn't want to touch this issue, but, well, indeed, I had a look on Sam Lantinga's SDL package some time ago (I believe, a new version exists now). I know that Johnny Andersen (somewhere near DIKU, plenty of craziness on his ÁNOQ pages...) produced a Standard ML bindings for that. But reading this stuff I was simply scared to death! Using simultaneously 6 compilers, passing through "C" code, etc. - my impression was: OK, it should work. If somebody wants to write a game, a concrete simulation in ML, it might help him.
I tried to install tbat stuff a while ago, I spend 2 days cursing and after a friendly but unhelpful email exchange I gave up.. I have no clue how to get that stuff working. Sounded really cool though: an ML implementation that is on average 3 times as fast as SML/NJ, a lightweight C interface, support for crosscompiling ML+SDL applications from Linux to Windows. Maybe I should try one more time.. Jan