[Haskell-cafe] ANN: Haskell OpenGL package updates

[Jason Dagit]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 2:07 PM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason,
> Thank you for taking ownership of HOpenGL!

Thanks!

> I would like to make a formal request for there to be some way to get access
> to either
> Graphics.Rendering.OpenGL.Raw.Core31.TypesInternal
> or that
> Graphics.Rendering.OpenGL.Raw.Core31.Types
> re-export the newtype wrappers it places around CDouble and CFloat.
> As things stand the only way to work with them is to pointlessly round-trip
> through rational or pray that GHC is smart enough to automatically convert
> once it sees through the newtype, which it isn't, potentially costing me
> orders of magnitude of performance in tight loops in exchange for
> implementation freedom the current OpenGL bindings do not use on any
> platform.

Yes, it's a real problem.  I think there are a couple directions we
could move in (and some may not even be mutually exclusive).

Andy Gill created this workaround:
{-# RULES "realToFrac/a->GLfloat" realToFrac = \x -> GLfloat (realToFrac x)
#-}
{-# RULES "realToFrac/GLfloat->a" realToFrac = \(GLfloat x) -> realToFrac x
#-}

That one helps a lot for most people.

Someone made a libraries proposal that also helps the conversion
situation but I don't have the details handy at the moment.

If you read here, I'd like to get some MArray support in and I think
it's possible, although I haven't the idea I proposed yet:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2011-March/090511.html

Another thing we could do is find a different balance between newtypes
and the C types.

I'm totally onboard with exposing all of OpenGLRaw.  I think we just
need to sufficiently document the "internal" bits so that only people
who absolutely need them will use them.  That's how I see ByteString
and it seems to be working there.

Thanks for your suggestion (and your pull request on github, yay for
collaborative tools!).

Jason