[Haskell-cafe] Poll & plea: State of GUI & graphics libraries in Haskell

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Tikhon Jelvis wrote:
> Could threepenny work with webGL, or is that too far out of the scope of
> the project? I guess the overhead of having a server--even locally--and
> using a web browser might just be too much for many use cases.

Actually, I'm reading about WebGL right now, and it appears to me that 
it should be very easy to support in Threepenny.

While the communication between browser and server is comparatively 
slow, most of the hard work is done in the shading language anyway. The 
browser retrieves shading code from a `script` tag. It's straightforward 
to create such a tag in Threepenny, populate it, and make a few 
JavaScript FFI calls to start the rendering process.

I currently have no plans to add WebGL support myself, but all the 
ingredients are in place. (Maybe wait until threepenny-0.4 , as I'm 
currently simplifying the FFI a bit.)


PS: Conal, if you want to see whether the Threepenny + WebGL route is 
viable for you, it's probably a good idea to do a quick test in plain 
HTML + JS first, to see whether performance is good enough for your purpose.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com