[Haskell-cafe] Re: Wrapping FTGL in FFI calls

[Jefferson Heard]

Well, Achim you were almost exactly correct.  I have a functional function
interface in about half an hour's worth of work.  I have one question, which
is how to create a Ptr to four CFloats on the fly, pass them to the bounding
box functions, and then come back out with a [Float]

My prototype looks like this:
foreign import ccall unsafe "ftglGetFontBBox" fgetFontBBox :: Font ->
CString -> Ptr CFloat -> IO ()

the ptr to cfloat should be a float[4], which is modified inside the
original C function.

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Achim Schneider <barsoap at web.de> wrote:

> "Jefferson Heard" <jefferson.r.heard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I've been looking for awhile now for a simple way to get truetype
> > fonts into my visualizations so I can abandon the hideous GLUT fonts
> > and make things that look like they were developed in the 1990s
> > instead of back in the days of TRON.  I found FTGL, but I'm mostly a
> > Haskell developer these days, and resent having to go back to C just
> > to write a simple application.
> >
> > So I was wondering if anyone had ever wrapped the FTGL library in
> > Haskel FFI or whether those out there who are experts on the FFI
> > think at first glance it should be readily wrappable by a rank
> > amateur at FFI such as myself.
> >
> > http://ftgl.sourceforge.net/docs/html/
> >
> Using the FFI is generally straight forward, as long as you can live
> with using the IO monad and the C code uses objects (well,
> pointers to structs passed as first argument, where's the
> difference...).
>
> Things only depend on the purity of the C code and how high-level you
> want your interface to be. In this case, I estimate half an hour if
> you're a fast typist. That includes the time needed to read the FFI
> docs.
>
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