On 7/15/07, ajb@spamcop.net
For the record, I've written 2.5 production shader compilers. The 0.5 was in Haskell. :-)
I may have played with 1.0 of them. One thing I'd also like to mention about the bigger picture behind rendering: many artist tools in the graphics world use visual dataflow programming. This allows bridging the gap between artists and programmers. These tools include tools for animation, modelling, compositing and so on. Frequently, the model underlying these tools is pure, functional and lazy. It was interesting talking to one artist colleague last week who was pointing out some issues with one such system he was using. It had a couple of features that he found slightly counterintuitive. Curiously enough, those features were precisely where the system he was using failed to be pure. So I can't help wondering if Haskell might not be a natural fit for such tools. -- Dan