[Haskell-cafe] ANN: Elerea, another FRP library

[Peter Verswyvelen]

I will test it on a couple of machines, desktops and laptops. I think the
problem was my laptop going into power safe mode or something, since
sometimes it runs smooth, sometimes it doesn't. This could indeed be a
problem with GLFW's time attribute on windows (which uses the CPU tick
frequency which gets trottled to safe energy), although I believe the
Windows API should take care of this. I haven't seen this yet with my own
frp experiments, which seem to run smooth all the time, but again I will do
more testing.
I have been thinking about your approach, using mutable variables to hold a
signal's sample. This is exactly what I did with on old C# prototype, and it
worked out nicely. If you take a look what Yampa does: it hides signals and
only exposes signal functions. But that means that the FRP engine itself
could indeed use mutable variables for its signals, as long as during the
evaluation of the circuit at time T no side effects should occur; the side
effects should take place when the simulation is advanced to T+dT, which is
done after the circuit is fully evaluated at time T. If you want higher
order integration, you would need to keep a buffer of more samples, but it
would still work. So I think you approach is a very good pragmatic one! I'm
only a bit worried about your automatic insertion of delays; this might
break referential transparency at time T, since it depends on the order in
which the nodes in the circuit are evaluated no? The latter could be
problematic when doing evaluation in parallel on multiple cores I guess.

2009/4/14 Patai Gergely <patai_gergely at fastmail.fm>

> > Interesting. I'm testing it on Window though. You're using Linux? Maybe
> > the scheduling is different.
> Now I tried it on Windows in VirtualBox, and it still looks quite smooth
> to me (except that hardware acceleration doesn't seem to work properly
> through virtualisation, but it's okay as long as I keep the window small
> enough). However, unlike the Linux version, it does max out the CPU, so
> the trick with threadDelay 0 doesn't work. Apparently, I'll have to find
> a real Windows box somewhere, because I couldn't reproduce the jerkiness
> you're talking about.
>
> Gergely
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - The way an email service should be
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20090414/41758457/attachment.htm