[Haskell-cafe] Merging the OpenGLRaw and gl packages

[Casey McCann]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 10:29 AM, Sven Panne <svenpanne at gmail.com> wrote:
>   * Should OpenGLRaw use pattern synonyms? (Probably yes, but note that this
> implies GHC >= 7.8.1)
>
>   * Should OpenGLRaw use the 'Half' type from the 'half' package? (Probably
> yes, but again this implies GHC 7.8.1)

7.8.1 is, what, a year and a half old?

I'm all for bleeding edge personally but not everyone feels that way,
and that seems pretty severe relative to the benefits.

That said, I don't actually have any specific arguments against
requiring GHC >= 7.8.1 since I'm fine with it myself and, as mentioned
on the wiki, it's not like the older package versions will disappear.

As an aside regarding the wiki discussion, I don't really see how
there's a sane way to have a combined low-level API for WebGL and full
OpenGL. At least as of last time I did anything with it, there are a
huge number of minor differences in the API that I don't know how
you'd paper over. If anything, WebGL might be a good role model to
imitate for a slightly higher level, less fiddly but still directly
mapped to the underlying layer, API for GL.

I'm sure Edward had some plan for how to add WebGL support, but short
of having a completely separate set of modules for it I can't imagine
how it'd work.

- C.