[Haskell-cafe] GLUT, FLGW, FLGW-b

[Schell Scivally]

I've also used a little bitmap font rendering for my tetris clone. It's
very simple and I *think* that the process for using freetype is pretty
similar:

1. Render all glyphs of the font into a texture.
2. Draw 2D shapes using the texture.

https://github.com/schell/blocks/blob/master/src/Graphics/TextRenderer.hs#L90


On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 1:01 AM, Tim C. Schroeder <tim at blitzcode.net> wrote:

> I'd agree, use GLFW-b. I'm very happy with it!
>
> As far as the font rendering is concerned, if all you need is a basic
> bitmap font to get some text on the screen, you might be able to use some
> code I wrote as a self-contained, drop-in replacement:
>
>
> https://github.com/blitzcode/haskell-gol/blob/master/parallel-glfwb/src/Font.hs
>
> (Looking at that code now, might want to bracket inside of
> withFontTexture. That code was written before Simon Marlow's book taught me
> about the wonders of Haskell exception handling...)
>
> I also wrote a Haskell FT2 binding. It's a very nice library with a decent
> API and few dependencies, so that was quite doable. The problem is that FT2
> is really 'just' a glyph rasterizer. All other functionality is either
> rudimentary (kerning, glyph mapping) or out of the scope of the library
> (ligatures, glyph substitution, OpenType text layout in general). You'll
> need another library on top / besides it to get text rendering quality like
> in native GUI toolkits or a web browser. Obvious choices would be Pango or
> HarfBuzz, but those are more complicated to write a Haskell binding for
> (dependencies, C++, etc.).
>
> A 'just works' solution for platform and giant-GUI-toolkit independent,
> high-quality text rendering is sorely missing from the Haskell ecosystem,
> as far as I can tell. Doing an FT2 binding and the OpenGL glyph caching /
> texture atlas generation etc. is fine, but I'm afraid getting something
> like HarfBuzz/Pango up and running exceeds my Cabal-fu, for now.
>
> Cheers,
> Tim
>
> On Dec 12, 2013, at 11:49 PM, Jason Dagit wrote:
>
> > I started using it after making the following comparison several years
> ago: http://blog.codersbase.com/posts/2011-03-17-picking-gui-library.html
> >
> > Maybe that analysis is useful to you as well? Just so you know, it's
> probably out of date by now, so you might want to double check some of my
> claims. For example, the C library for GLFW doesn't use atexit() anymore
> (which is a good thing).
> >
> > Getting back to your question: As I recall, it's better maintained,
> lighter weight, and it has better dependencies. With GLFW-b you can use
> either OpenGL or OpenGLRaw, whereas GLFW depends directly on OpenGL. The
> main drawback, for me, is that GLFW-b doesn't support fonts.
> >
> > My proposed solution to that was to make a binding to the freetype2
> library (you can find my binding on hackage/github). I never really
> finished that project. The binding should work but it's very low level. A
> few people have sent me example code they wrote to use it with OpenGL. It's
> really something I should finish :) The other cool thing about using
> freetype for fonts is that you can easily make it part of a rendering
> system that doesn't use any OS rendering libraries (eg., add font support
> to a ray-tracer).
> >
> > Jason
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Vlad Lopatin <madjestic13 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Thanks, Jason
> >
> > What makes you prefer GLFW-b instead GLFW?
> >
> >
> > On 12 December 2013 19:15, Jason Dagit <dagitj at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 3:05 AM, Sven Panne <svenpanne at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2013/12/12 Vlad Lopatin <madjestic13 at gmail.com>:
> > > I keep reading (wiki) that GLUT is a legacy package and some libraries
> (e.g.
> > > GLFW) are meant to replace it.  I also see that some of the GLUT
> > > functionality is based on fixed pipeline.  What is the current status
> of
> > > Haskell GLUT?  Is it 'to stay' or something that is going to be
> deprecated
> > > at some point?  Should one try replacing it with GLFW(-b) in a
> project, if
> > > fixed pipeline is not expected to be used?
> >
> > I think this really depends on your needs: GLUT was designed as a
> > simple cross-platform API for OpenGL demos and tutorials, perhaps even
> > some programs of medium complexity.
> >
> > I prefer GLFW-b for cross platform programs for the simple reason that
> on windows GLUT requires you to install a DLL and make sure it's in the
> path.
> >
> > I prefer GLFW-b more generally because it's more modern, fully open
> source, and under active development. The license for GLUT is open in
> practice but it's not a clean open source license. I guess most people use
> freeglut instead.
> >
> > Jason
> >
> >
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-- 
Schell Scivally
http://blog.efnx.com
http://github.com/schell
http://twitter.com/schellsan
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