BAL paper available >> graphic libraries

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

[[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.


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.

But, on the other hand if you want to have a decent programming platform,
enabling you to write - even (or: especially) for pedagogical purposes
some graphic tools of universal character, say,
* a model ray tracer with the "native" scene description language (i.e.
  the same language for the core implementation, and for the scene/object
  description, and for its scripting (animation)),
* a generic texture generator and image processing toolbox with all such
  stuff as relational algebra of images, math. morphology, etc.,
* a radiosity machine 
* ... dozen of other projects ...

then without a common memory management, without rebuilding the - say -
Haskell runtime *with* SDL or other low-level graphics utilities, it
might be difficult to use.

The approach taken by Clean'ers, to have an "almost intrinsic" graphic
object-oriented IO layer, and building their Game Library upon it, seems
more reasonable, and at any rate it has more sex-appeal for those who
are truly interested in practical functional programming as such, and
not just in stacking some external goodies which integrate badly with the
language.

Bother, I realized that my main contributions to this list are just
complaining. Somebody could teleport me to a desert island, with
some computers, but without hoards of students just for 6 months?

Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France