On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 7:25 PM, David Duke <djd@comp.leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

Conal Elliott wrote:

When I run a glut progam in os x under ghci, I get strange behavior, including a blank white title bar (no red/orange/green buttons and no title). If I compile with ghc --make and run, i get a normal title bar.

Asking on #haskell today [1], I hear that glut and ghci don't get along on os x.

What's known about this problem? Is it fixable? I get a lot of value out of having a REPL, so I hope there's a solution.

This sounds like the problem due to ghci not running as a Mac App. If it is, the solution *used* to be to use the "EnableGUI" module and fix described on the SOE page http://www.haskell.org/soe/software1.htm; using this, I was able to run glut programs from ghci under OSX.

However, compiled GLUT programs works perfectly well without being an App
(unlike say, programs using GLFW or wxWidgets), which is in my eyes a big advantage of GLUT.

The easy (though not at all ideal) way out of the ghci problem is to have a separate GLUT application,
and communicate with the ghci part via tcp/ip or other interprocess communication method. This also solves
the problems stemming from the fact that the original glut is horribly broken in some aspects (which freeglut
tries to fix, but freeglut is not universally installed)

Balazs