Recently I wrote a 3D graphics viewer using Gtk2hs and Cairo, and it works ok,
aside from the fact that it got quite slow when it got to displaying about 1000
polygons. It works something like this: The three-dimensional coordinates of
polygons are given, and the program sorts the polygons using a BSP Tree
(following the Painter's Algorithm), then it projects the polygons onto the
plane of vision and renders each polygon to the screen using Cairo. After some
investigation, I realised that my bottleneck was the rendering of polygons, but
I could not speed up the rendering using parallel programming since the
rendering order is crucial in the Painter's Algorithm. Even if I switched to an
algorithm based on Hidden Surface Removal so I could render all my "obscured"
polygons at once, Gtk2hs "is single threaded and its functions cannot be called
from other threads".
Then I heard about FieldTrip, which uses the GPU to process rendering
efficiently. I decided to switch to using FieldTrip in conjunction with Gtk2hs
to write applications, but it doesn't seem that easy because (i) there doesn't
seem to be any version of GHC where Gtk2hs, Glade and Fieldtrip can work
together on Windows and (ii) unlike Cairo, there is no Gtk2hs support for
Fieldtrip in the sense that there are no Gtk2hs functions that render FieldTrip
output to a Gtk2hs widget, like the DrawWindow. The latter would mean that
Gtk2hs can't interact easily with FieldTrip.
I really like Gtk2hs because it is very comprehensive and its interface can be
designed using Glade. Does anyone know if there is a project linking Gtk2hs and
FieldTrip? Otherwise, does anyone know if user interfaces can be written using
Reactive (since it's linked to FieldTrip) with the usual functionality (e.g.
menus, buttons, FieldTrip display reacting to mouseclicks etc)? If that is
possible then I might have to switch to Reactive, but I'd miss Glade a lot :)
regards,
Herng Yi
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