[Haskell-cafe] Problem with GLUT - no visuals found

[Jason Dagit]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Chris Smith <cdsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 11:50 -0700, Jason Dagit wrote:
>> What is your deadline for making sure you have a working library?
>>
>
> I don't know... August?  In any case, I do now have a working library,
> so long as I remember not to use GHCi for it!
>
> While GLFW would certainly be far preferable to GLUT in the long run,
> the fact is that Gloss is already implemented using GLUT, and I can make
> GLUT work.  So I'll plan on using that unless someone else volunteers to
> port Gloss to GLFW.
>
> (To be honest, I did consider it when I first ran into this problem a
> week ago; but after a few hours of hacking at it, it became clear that
> it's too large a job, and I'm far too unfamiliar with GLUT, GLFW, or
> OpenGL, for that to be feasible as yet another side project for me.)

Yes, I've suggested to the author of Gloss that he should switch to
GLFW-b but he basically said what you said.  He considered it when I
mentioned it, but since Gloss already works with GLUT he wouldn't do
it unless someone sent him the patches.  Which is fair from a
maintenance point of view.  The downside is that all the windows users
of Gloss have to get/install the glut32.dll from somewhere before
Gloss will work for them.  GLFW-b doesn't have that restriction.

Also, when I first looked at GLFW I thought it didn't call atexit()
(GLUT uses atexit(), which I think is kind of an evil C function,
without having a specific gripe other than it being global mutable
state), but it does actually use it.  This line of thought always
leads me to think that we should have a purely Haskell implementation
of GLFW/GLUT on top of the platform specific gui bindings.

At any rate, I'm glad to hear you have what you need for your class.

Jason