[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why binding to existing widget toolkits doesn't make any sense

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Hi Conal,
Do you have any links to this interesting work of Jefferson Heard? Blogs or
something? I failed to Google it, I mainly found his OpenGL TrueType
bindings on Hackage and his beautiful
http://bluheron.europa.renci.org/docs/BeautifulCode.pdf

Regarding semantics, modern GPUs are able to render 2D graphics (e.g. filled
or stroked curves) as real functions / relations; you don't need fine
tessellation anymore since these computational monsters have become so fast
that per pixel inside / outside testing are feasible now. It's basically a
simple form of real-time ray-tracing :)  A quick search revealed another
paper using these techniques
http://alice.loria.fr/publications/papers/2005/VTM/vtm.pdf

Cheers,
Peter

2009/1/31 Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net>

> Hi Antony,
>
>
>> Hopefully some enterprising Haskell hacker will wrap Cairo in a nice
>> purely functional API.
>
>
> Jefferson Heard is working on such a thing, called Hieroglyph.  Lately I've
> been helping him simplify the design and shift it toward a clear, composable
> semantic basis, i.e. "genuinely functional" (as in the Fruit paper), meaning
> that it can be understood & reasoned about in precise terms via model that
> is much simpler than IO.
>
> In the process, I realized more clearly that the *very goal* of making a
> purely functional wrapper around an imperative library leads to muddled
> thinking.  It's easy to hide the IO without really eliminating it from the
> semantics, especially if the goal is defined in terms of an IO-based
> library.  Much harder, and I think much more rewarding, is to design
> semantically, from the ground up, and then figure out how to implement the
> elegant semantics with the odds & ends at hand (like Cairo, OpenGL, GPU
> architectures, ...).
>
> Regards,
>
>     - Conal
>
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Antony Courtney <
> antony.courtney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Antony Courtney <
>> antony.courtney at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> A 2-D vector graphics library such as Java2D ( or Quartz on OS/X or
>> >> GDI+ on Windows ) supports things like computing tight bounding
>> >> rectangles for arbitrary shapes, hit testing for determining whether a
>> >> point is inside or outside a shape and constructive area geometry for
>> >> shape compositing and clipping without dropping down to a raster
>> >> representation.
>> >
>> > These are the kinds of capabilities provided by Cairo, which is very
>> > pleasant to use (PDF-style imaging model) and quite portable. There are
>> > already Cairo bindings provided by gtk2hs, too.
>> >
>>
>> Hi Bryan,
>>
>> Nice to hear from you!  Been a while...
>>
>> Just had a quick look and it does indeed appear that Cairo now
>> supports some of the features I mention above (bounds calculations and
>> hit testing).  Cairo has clearly come a long way from when I was last
>> working on Fruit and Haven in 2003/2004;  back then it looked like it
>> only provided a way to render or rasterize vector graphics on to
>> bitmap surfaces and not much else.
>>
>> It's not clear to me if the Cairo API in its current form supports
>> vector-level clipping or constructive area geometry, and it looks like
>> the API is still pretty render-centric (e.g. is it possible to obtain
>> the vector representation of rendering text in a particular font?).
>> That might make it challenging to use Cairo for something like the
>> Haven API, but maybe one can live without that level of generality.
>>
>> In any case: delighted to see progress on this front!  Hopefully some
>> enterprising Haskell hacker will wrap Cairo in a nice purely
>> functional API.
>>
>>    -Antony
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