I want to create a GUI application on OSX with Haskell. It mainly should be about drawing on a canvas. I tried the following options but none of them worked:
WX. It doesn't work well because of dependency on obsolete quicktime version. I can't compile with it and can't use it in ghci.
Gtk2hs. It involves very complicated install process which fails for me with homebrew (I tried the sequence on haskell.org wiki but it didn't work for me probably because of OSX10.8).
Are there any other options?
If you're just drawing 2D shapes on a canvas, you could try gloss.
Related
Does anyone have advice on creating a side-scrolling action game in Ruby?
I am particularly looking for libraries, tools, or guides. I've built a terminal text-based game however now I'd like to involve graphics and possibly run the game outside of terminal.
It's important to me that it be in Ruby.
How about libgosu?
http://www.libgosu.org/
"Gosu is a 2D game development library for the Ruby and C++ programming languages, available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It has been in development since 2001."
"Ruby/Gosu integrates well:
gem install gosu
complete with examples, precompiled for Windows & OS X"
A very nice toolkit for making 2D graphics is SDL there are ruby bindings available at
http://www.kmc.gr.jp/~ohai/rubysdl.en.html
oreilly net has a very nice article about writing games with ruby here
https://web.archive.org/web/20170813235228/http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/12/04/creating-games-in-ruby.html
If jruby is ok for you, you can use various java libries for the gfx part like java2D or
processing ( http://www.rubyinside.com/using-the-processing-graphics-system-from-ruby-780.html )
I would like to build a GUI for an OCaml application I'm writing. My first idea was to use GTK+. I would like my application to run on Macs, Linux, Windows with a natural look and feel. I know that, while GTK+ uses X11 on the Mac by default (which looks awful), there is gtk-osx-application which uses quartz and looks natural and which I've just installed using macports.
I have three questions:
(1) Is it actually possible to use gtk-osx-application +quartz+no_x11 with OCaml? (My GODI installation which previously (with x11-based gtk2 in place) installed lablgtk2 with no problems, now (with gtk-osx-application +quartz+no_x11 and the previous x11-based gtk2 removed) is complaining about not finding /opt/local/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.0.dylib, which is x11 related. But, as far as I know, there's no way to choose quartz over x11 when installing lablgtk2 through GODI.)
(2) If I develop my code on my Mac using the gtk-osx-application, can I use the code as is for compilation in other platforms which use different GTKs or can this bring problems?
(3) If it does bring problems, do you know of any other environment for developing GUIs in OCaml that may potentially be good regarding both look and feel and still be readily cross-used? (I am aware of labltk but I'd prefer something with more capabilities, for example, the ability to use notebooks, a.k.a tabbed panels, and being able to use Glade for rapid GUI design.)
Thanks for any help!
Cheers,
Surikator
Assuming you can get lablgtk to work, it is probably your best bet at present.
To get it working: have you tried rebuilding lablgtk after removing X11 GTK and installing Quartz GTK? A LablGTK built against X11 GTK naturally won't work on a Quartz GTK, as it will be linked against the wrong library, but a rebuild might be successful. It could also be that LablGTK won't correctly detect that X11 integration calls don't work and therefore fail to build, but I would expect that to be not-too-difficult to fix as LablGTK does support Windows.
If you develop code for GTK on Mac, it should work on other platforms just fine. You'll want to test it, of course, but it should work. Do be careful to use the GTK facilities to make things like dialog button order work properly.
I think there was at one time a set of OCaml bindings to wxWidgets, but they do not seem to be widely used and wx is painful to work with in my experience. There has also been some work on making Qt bindings, which would be awesome, but I don't think there are any projects with good headway on that front yet.
If the UI is a small-ish piece of your project, you could look at decoupling it from the backend and writing the UI in C++ with Qt, or writing platform-native UIs, and having the UI call out to OCaml code in an embedded runtime to get the real work done. But that is likely more work and may not give you much benefit, depending on your application.
So: GTK is your best option in the current landscape.
I want to learn Ocaml or Haskell and I want to do it by writing a simple game. Apparently, there's one small problem: nobody cares about Windows and I want to do it on Windows, natively.
Haskell has Cabal, which has SDL, but it doesn't build due to a trivial problem with no workarounds (order of parameters passed to gcc). Ocaml doesn't even have that, it's all in source packages, be it GLCaml or OcamlSDL or whatever.
Is there a place where I can get a working SDL for Haskell or Ocaml on Windows without fighting with a dozen versions of compilers?
The Haskell Platform comes with a binding to OpenGL which should work out of the box on Windows.
Concerning the SDL package on hackage, you can use cabal unpack SDL to get the source code and fix things yourself. To install the package with your changes, run cabal install in the unpacked directory. In any case, drop a line to the maintainer, I'm sure he'll help out.
It's not related to SDL, but you've mentioned OpenGL. There is LablGL binding for OpenGL in OCaml which works out of the box. Wiki example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_Caml#Triangle_.28graphics.29) compiles and works just fine.
The best instructions I've found for getting SDL to work in windows with a the most recent Haskell platform can be found at this blog. I followed everything step-by-step and it worked perfectly, despite some configure error messages.
It isn't SDL but GLFW works on Windows with Haskell through Cabal.
My article High-fidelity graphics with OpenGL 2 (25th Feb 2008) explained how the GLCaml bindings can be used to write OpenGL-based applications in OCaml that use vertex and fragment shaders (a phong shader is given as an example). There are 9 articles in the OCaml Journal on OpenGL, albeit mostly using the older LablGL library for OpenGL 1.1.
I tried and failed to get OpenGL working from Haskell under Linux in 2007. The Haskell Platform may have changed that but I have neither had time to try it yet myself nor ever heard of anyone using it for this.
However, both OCaml and Haskell must rely upon fragile low-level bindings to OpenGL because they are standalone languages and nobody has ever managed to get any significant commercial software using them to work. As you're on Windows, F#+XNA is a far more logical choice because XNA is tried and tested and F# has a safe high-level interface to it. A Google fight gives you a good idea of what a pioneer you'll be: +haskell +opengl gives 437 hits on Google and +ocaml +opengl gives only 347 hits.
I want to overlay text on images on OS X, preferably without installing additional software, so that, as a sysadmin, I can know at a glance that machines are up-to-date, in a way that is easily scriptable and easily modifiable, and can run without GUI access. [Being able to overlay images or apply color-changing effects would be a bonus.]
Mac OS X Leopard comes with a ton of stuff built-in: Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl/Tk, Bash; wxWidgets, some Quartz integration, and even Objective-C integration for Python and Ruby. There must be several good ways to do this, if I were only versed in these systems.
I'm continuing to go through the examples in the /Developer folder on my computer, and I have got a partial idea of how this might be done in Cocoa and converted to PyObjC. I decided I would have to deploy ImageMagick, but in my testing, I am running into an infamous bus error, and would prefer not to have to compile ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick with all its dependancies if I can do what I need to out-of-the-box. [That said, I would consider installing additional components, but it would be a big win to have something that would work on a stock install of OS X].
This seems like it'd be relatively simple to do using Python and the Python Imaging Library (PIL). I don't think PIL is installed with OS X by default, but it's relatively easy to install manually and doesn't have a ton of dependencies. The PIL tutorials are also pretty good -- it shouldn't be too hard to whip up a command-line or GUI program to do what you want.
CocoaMagic is a single-file replacement for large parts of RMagick (Ruby integration with ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick). It should be useable as a library in its own right, or by appending things to the bottom of the script.
I'm using Emacs, with CLISP and Slime, and want to be able to draw pictures on the screen. I'm specifically thinking about drawing graphs, but anything that would let me draw basic shapes and manipulate them would be able to get me started.
Doug is right; CAPI will work fine. Other things you can try:
cltk: http://www.cliki.net/Lisp-Tk
I know that Allegro has something for Windows programming also, but I've never tried it.
What may also work is cells-gtk: http://common-lisp.net/project/cells-gtk/
Again, I can only tell you that it exists but not how bad it is or if it even really works...
I can not comment also on the quality of
http://www.cliki.net/GTK%20binding
But that's mostly what is available.
Corman Lisp probably has something to offer for Windows programming also.
Anyway, the choices on Windows are relatively slim. The you can probably have the most confidence in CAPI, which is used for the LispWorks IDE on Windows, Linux, MacOS X and on quite few big unices also...
Regards
I think I've found my own answer. Clojure seems to have everything I was looking for, just because I can now use all of the Java GUI items natively in LISP. It is a different dialect of LISP than the Common-Lisp I was using, but seems to have a lot of community support, and integrates with my Windows installation of Emacs either through SLIME or through the Inferior-Lisp interpreter. So far I've been very impressed.
Oh, a code sample:
(. javax.swing.JOptionPane (showMessageDialog nil "Hello World"))
Any guesses what this does? :)
Bill Clementson's blog has quite a bit on Clojure, including a lot of helpful posts on installing it. See here: his posts on Clojure
You could switch from CLISP to the free LispWorks Personal Edition and use the CAPI Graphics Ports drawing API.
Or you could use Lisp's Foreign Function Interface and use one of the graphics toolkits available for your OS.
For rolling your own (like you said, basic shapes) try Lispbuilder-SDL or one of the cl-cairo FFIs (it's just my guess that the latter work with MS Windows, though).
I know this is an old post, but so the information is here for others like me who find this thread looking for the same thing.
This library for tk bindings in common lisp seems to work fairly well.
http://www.peter-herth.de/ltk/
Clojure is an excellent Lisp, and Swing is a solid (if not particularly visually exciting) windowing toolkit. If you want do do more advanced graphics and/or dabble with game programming you might want to check out Slick, which is a general purpose graphics/game library that sits on top of Swing and gives you access to OpenGL and lots of other stuff.
I've found the Clojure/Slick combination an excellent way to do exploratory graphics programming, as you can interact with the graphics window directly from the REPL.
There's cl-cairo2 - a binding to Cairo vector drawing library. It can be used to draw various pictures on various surfaces. There's a cl-2d library that uses cl-cairo2 to draw charts.
And there's cl-gtk2 - a binding to Gtk+ library. You can create widgets that are drawn with cl-cairo2 (or cl-2d) that draw what you want.
CLISP users might find The following useful for their graphics applications:
cl-vectors is a pure Common Lisp
library to create, transform and
render anti-aliased vectorial paths.
It can be installed using
ASDF-Install.
http://projects.tuxee.net/cl-vectors/
Vecto is a simplified interface to the
powerful CL-VECTORS vector
rasterization library....the results
can be saved to a PNG ... Since Vecto
and all supporting libraries are
written completely in Common Lisp,
without depending on external non-Lisp
libraries, it should work in any
Common Lisp environment. Vecto is
available under a BSD-like license.
The current version is 1.4.3, released
on August 26, 2009.
http://www.xach.com/lisp/vecto/