[Haskell-cafe] graphics Windows Programming

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 14:25 +0100, Andrew U. Frank wrote:
>  There are several graphics packages to select from... But which one is
> the easiest to work  with for students for a ghci - windows environment.
> 
> 
> I sense that cairo / gtk2hs does not support ghci. 

At the moment we can make it work with GHC or with GHCi but not both at
the same time.

The details of the exact problem were described here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=11297970

If you only want to use it in GHCi and not GHC then you'd be ok. I can
show you what to do.

If it helps, we hope to have this problem solved in GHC 6.4.2 by
allowing Gtk2Hs to use a slightly different list of DLLs with GHCi than
with GHC.

> >From the HOpenGL home page I cannot find out what I would need to
> download for a windows environment (can somebody point me to the right
> direction?).

HOpenGL comes with GHC. I've had programs that use Gtk2Hs with HOpenGL
working on windows.

> We have used SOE under hugs but I sense it is not working with ghci? We
> found it also somewhat deficient for graphics beyond the content of the
> book - has it been extended and improved?

The current development version of Gtk2Hs comes with an implementation
of SOE. This has already been used for teaching a university course.

For a more sophisticated graphics API you can use the cairo library that
comes with Gtk2Hs. This provides a monadic API rather than SOE's
expression style API. On the other hand it is far more powerful and can
produce stunning results.

Do get back to me if any of this is of interest to you.

Duncan