[HOpenGL] Pure, garbage-collected graphics resources

[David Duke]

Sam Martin wrote:
>
> I’ve been thinking about something similar for a while, and am toying 
> with the idea of building the rendering pipeline as a typed 
> expression. It’s all very hand-wavey thoughts at the moment, but I 
> reckon it’s possible to define a function that describes the pipeline 
> you want to establish and then ‘compile’ that expression into an 
> executable object.
>

We've been working on this approach at Leeds.  Last year we submitted an 
entry to the IEEE Visualization contest using a rendering framework 
where you create something akin to a scene graph as a data structure.  
Interfacing with OpenGL is done behind the scenes, including traversing 
the tree to render, and to respond to events.  See our paper in PADL'09 
- source code at www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/funvis/.

We're currently extending this in two directions.  One is better support 
for writing embedded interactors, which transform a tree in response to 
an event.  We now have a nice parallel coordinates example with 
interactive brushing of the axes embedded directly into the scene, hope 
to put up on the web at some point.   The other ...
>
>  It’s equivalent to defining the graph of the pipeline and compiling 
> that into an executable sequence.
>
... is essentially that, though for vis pipelines rather than just 
graphics.    Not yet at a point where we could answer Conal's questions, 
but also working towards it.

David

-- 
Dr. David Duke                      E: djd at comp.leeds.ac.uk
School of Computing                 W: www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/djd/
University of Leeds                 T: +44 113 3436800
Leeds, LS2 9JT, U.K.