Thanks for pointing this out, although I knew that kind of answer via
papers about Pan.
It means I'll have to improve my compiler writing knowlegde :)
mt
2006/6/21, oleg@pobox.com
Recently Vo Minh Thu wondered if Haskell (or, I generalize, functional programming) can be of much use for computer graphics programming.
I'd like to point out a project that experimentally shown that functional programming is of great help for processing of large raster images (24-bit PPM files). The paper describing the system has been accepted for `Science of Computer Programming' and is in press:
Combining Partial Evaluation and Staged Interpretation in the Implementation of Domain-Specific Languages Christoph A. Herrmann, Tobias Langhammer
The code for the system is available online http://infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/cl/metaprog/imagefilter2-2005-10-30.tgz
The previous [slightly obsolete] version of the paper, presented at the MetaOCaml'04 workshop, is available online http://www.fmi.uni-passau.de/forschung/mip-berichte/MIP-0410.html
The paper includes a few pictures and the table with benchmark, so we can observe the benefits. Now, with offshoring and native MetaOCaml fully implemented, we can gain bigger benefits.
In this project, functional programming does what it is probably best suited: to develop a `compiler' -- a compiler from a filter specification to quite efficient code. The code is specialized to all available static information. To be precise, the authors implement an interpreter -- which is then specialized to the source program and so interpretative overhead is removed and the code is optimized. Staging an interpreter automatically gives a compiler. Futamura projections are not only the fascinating, but useful, too.