BAL paper available >> graphic libraries

[Jan Kort]

Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
> 
> [[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.

Yes, SDL is a very interesting library, I wrote a wrapper for
part of it a while ago:
http://www.science.uva.nl/~kort/sdlhs/
It's far from complete and I have no plans to work on it. But for
trying out graphics stuff it's very useful, mainly because you
can understand the whole thing, fix it if it breaks down: make
some change and recompile the whole wrapper in a minute or so.

> 
> 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.

I tried to install tbat stuff a while ago, I spend 2
days cursing and after a friendly but unhelpful email
exchange I gave up.. I have no clue how to get that
stuff working. Sounded really cool though: an ML
implementation that is on average 3 times as fast as
SML/NJ, a lightweight C interface, support for
crosscompiling ML+SDL applications from Linux to Windows.
Maybe I should try one more time..

  Jan