PDL/SDL/OpenGL users- With the recently announced SDL2 release and in-progress work to provide perl bindings for the same, I wanted to share my thoughts for leveraging joint capabilities of these three modules with a couple of specific points.
1) SDL2 brings integrated hardware acceleration via Direct3D and/or OpenGL to both 2D and 3D graphics. This offers the possiblity of using modern OpenGL API features like renderbuffers for computation and display. 2) PDL provides a high level array computation language that can be used as a back-end engine for SDL applications and visualization. The PDL::Graphics::TriD currently uses the OpenGL-1.x fixed pipeline interface. 3) Perl OpenGL currently supports the original fixed-pipeline display process of OpenGL-1.x and some 2.x functionality. Work is underway to update the support to modern OpenGL APIs such as OpenGL-3.x, OpenGLES,... The common thread here is OpenGL, and I think that by updating the OpenGL use and interfaces to the modern programmable display pipeline we can generate significant synergy between the projects: 1) Update Perl OpenGL to modern OpenGL (In progress by slowed by the fact that my development time is spread too thin. Am I the only one with a whole slew of projects for which I know *exactly* what and how to do them but not having the time to execute? :-) 2) Refactor PDL::Graphics::TriD to use modern OpenGL for display rather than the fixed-function pipeline of OpenGL API 1.x. 3) Update PDL to support (simply) the use of arbitrary sources of data (e.g., I'm thinking framebuffer and renderbuffer objects but deliberately being more general since I could also imagine some sort of generator that could act like a piddle for computation with PDL). 4) Add GPGPU support to PDL computation. 5) Add support to the perl SDL2 interface to allow easy mix and match operation with PDL for computation, IO, and visualization. I could see PDL+GPGPU computing working well with realtime game or display computations. Well, the above ideas have a some hand waving to make them happen, but I think the pieces are there. Comments? Chris
