Hi,
The best low-level foundation libraries that I know of are the
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) [1,2]. They are cross-platform
: they support many backends (X11, OpenGL, framebuffer...) and are used
on desktops and mobile devices (even to provide games on the French Free
ISP box). It seems that they also work on exotic platforms such as
Windows and Mac OS.
They are fully written in C, hence are easy to build and to use from
Haskell.
Evas [3] is a stateful canvas onto which shapes and texts can be drawn.
It supports OpenGL regions [4]. Ecore [5] is used to manage windows,
timers, etc. especially with Ecore_Evas [6]. Edje allows you to clearly
separate UI and the rest of the code. The same thing has been integrated
into Qt with QML (and was present in Delphi decades ago ;)). It makes it
easy to create animated UI, etc. Finally, Elementary is a standard
widget toolkit based on Edje, Evas and Ecore.
The good news is that I have been working on an Haskell binding for the
EFL [7]. The bad news is that it is not complete. Evas, Ecore and
Ecore_Evas are partially done but need more polishing and testing. This
simple example here [8] works well in GHCI (even better than when the
program is compiled because I haven't yet figured out why the text is
not displayed in this latter case...).
I do not plan to write bindings for Edje and Elementary as I would
prefer an Haskell DSL to replace Edje and a widget toolkit on top of it
(another project seems to provide some bindings for Elementary [9]).
If you want to use the EFL as a "working foundation", I can try to work
a little bit more on the binding.
Cheers
Sylvain
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Foundation_Libraries
[2] http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en
[3] http://docs.enlightenment.org/auto/evas
[4] http://docs.enlightenment.org/auto/evas/group__Evas__GL.html
[5] http://docs.enlightenment.org/auto/ecore/
[6] http://docs.enlightenment.org/auto/ecore/group__Ecore__Evas__Group.html
[7] https://github.com/hsyl20/graphics-efl
[8] https://github.com/hsyl20/graphics-efl/blob/master/examples/Simple.hs
[9] https://bitbucket.org/arrowdodger/efl-haskell
Le 27/09/2013 05:32, Conal Elliott a écrit :
I'm polling to see whether there are will and expertise to reboot
graphics and GUIs work in Haskell. I miss working on functional
graphics and GUIs in Haskell, as I've been blocked for several years
(eight?) due to the absence of low-level foundation libraries having
the following properties:
* cross-platform,
* easily buildable,
* GHCi-friendly, and
* OpenGL-compatible.
The last several times I tried Gtk2hs, I was unable to compile it on
my Mac. Years ago when I was able to compile, the GUIs looked and
interacted like a Linux app, which made them awkward and upleasant to
use. wxHaskell (whose API and visual appearance I prefered) has for
years been incompatible with GHCi, in that the second time I open a
top-level window, the host process (GHCi) dies abruptly. Since my GUI
& graphics programs are often one-liners, and I tend to experiment a
lot, using a full compilation greatly thwarts my flow. For many years,
I've thought that the situation would eventually improve, since I'm
far from the only person who wants GUIs or graphics from Haskell.
About three years ago, I built a modern replacement of my old Pan and
Vertigo systems (optimized high-level functional graphics in 2D and
3D), generating screamingly fast GPU rendering code. I'd love to share
it with the community, but I'm unable to use it even myself.
Two questions:
* Am I mistaken about the current status? I.e., is there a solution
for Haskell GUI & graphics programming that satisfies the properties
I'm looking for (cross-platform, easily buildable, GHCi-friendly, and
OpenGL-compatible)?
* Are there people willing and able to fix this situation? My own
contributions would be to test and to share high-level composable and
efficient GUI and graphics libraries on top of a working foundation.
Looking forward to replies. Thanks,
-- Conal
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