[Haskell-cafe] Pixel plotter

[Andrew Coppin]

I write a lot of programs that build bitmapped images. (Some of you may 
remember the Chaos Pendulum Simulator...) Currently, all of these 
programs work by writing the final image data to a PPM file on disk. 
(Because that's the only way I can figure out to do something *useful* 
with the data!)

What I'd *like* to be able to do, in priority order:

1. Display images on the screen.
2. Save images as PNG files. (PPM eats too much space!)
3. Animate images on the screen.
4. With double-buffering.
5. Not break horribly when rendering in multiple threads.

As far as I know, all of this is *possible* with Gtk2hs right now - it's 
just vastly more complex than making a single function call. So what I'd 
like to do is write a small library which will enable me to do each of 
the above tasks in 1 function call. However, I'm getting nowhere fast 
with this. Anybody have any suggestions?

PS. I've investigated existing APIs and I'm not seeing anything that 
looks useful. Lots of support for drawing lines and arcs and so on, but 
not for plotting individual pixels.