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underlying-libs.md

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Underlying libraries criteria

  • C
  • fairly permissive license (BSD, MIT, ZLIB/LIBPNG)
    • No restrictions on static linking
    • Definitely not (L)GPL
  • actively maintained

Windowing/input

Allegro

  • Pros
    • Allegro 5 has a BSD3 license
    • actively maintained
    • supports multiple contexts
  • Cons
    • Existing Haskell bindings (BSD3) look unmaintained and incomplete (but not a bad start)
    • would be a very complicated build if we want to include it directly in a Haskell package
    • the addons have a lot of C dependencies (reasonable ones, at least)

GLUT - just no

GLFW - tentative yes

  • Pros

    • simple
    • quite portable (apart from the GHCi on OS X issue)
    • zlib/libpng license
    • multiple contexts as of v3

  • Cons

    • doesn't work in GHCi in OS X without some extra steps (probably not fundamentally due to the C lib)

SDL - rejected (due to LGPL)

  • Pros

    • many features
    • 2.0 is under zlib

  • Cons

    • limited audio interface
    • tough to make work out of the box (in jmcarthur's experiences)

SFML

  • Pros

    • Multiple contexts; does the managing for you
    • Many features
    • zlib/libpng license

  • Cons

    • It's C++ and therefore hard to make self-contained in a binding

WX

  • Pros

    • Works on Windows efortlessly
    • Lightweight
    • Immediate access to GUI stuff for applications that want it (most won't)

  • Cons

    • Haskell bindings have platform-specific build instructions

GTK

  • Pros

    • Lots of control
    • Immediate access to GUI stuff for applications that want it (most won't)

  • Cons

    • More work to use
    • Haskell bindings are crazy to set up
    • Not the best of citizens on all platforms (I think)
    • Last time I tried to build GTK on Windows I failed royally.
    • LGPL license

Native OS

  • Pros

    • Infinite flexibility

  • Cons

    • Soooooooo much work

Audio

portaudio (with some higher level C wrapper) - tentative yes

  • Pros

    • MIT

  • "Cons" (These aren't really cons because we're building a C wrapper)

    • existing bindings on hackage are bit-rotted
    • have to deal with callbacks to fill the audio buffer

  • Cons ?

OpenAL - rejected (new versions are proprietary)

Graphics

OpenGL - yes

Q: What version do we target?

A: 2.1 + very common extensions such as FBOs. This does not rule out the possibility of an end user using features from later versions, either.

Q: Quad per sprite or one quad for entire window?

A: Quad per sprite. The best reason is that it is more conventional, but it also saves us a lot of work. There are still plenty of opportunities to do fancy things if we want.

Text Rendering

TTF, bitmap, 2d/3d etc.

FreeType

FreeType-GL

  • Pros
  • Cons
    • Even bigger than plain FreeType, since it depends on it
    • Seems to require a fairly specific OpenGL state and may require some work to make it play well with others

std-truetype

  • Pros
  • Cons
    • A blog post I read claims that its quality and performance are not on par with FreeType

Image Loading

GraphicsMagick (http://www.graphicsmagick.org/)

  • Pros
    • MIT-licensed
    • Claims many improvements over ImageMagick including 100% memcheck/helgrind clean
  • Cons

DevIL - rejected due to licensing

http://openil.sourceforge.net/

  • Pros
    • Popular, well-tested etc (used by Ogre3D iirc)
  • Cons
    • LGPL

FreeImage

http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/

stb_image

http://nothings.org/stb_image.c

  • Pros
    • Extremely lightweight (single C file)
    • Public domain
    • Jeanne-Kamikaze: I have personally used it, extremely easy to use
    • Existing Haskell bindings
  • Cons
    • Does not support all types of images or compressions. Fails with some compressed PNGs and what not
    • Doesn't seem to be actively developed.

Corona

http://corona.sourceforge.net/

  • Pros
    • Mature
    • Easy to use
    • zlib license
    • It is actually active despite not having been updated in a long time. I personally couldn't get it building on Arch, mailed the author and got it fixed the next day (Jeanne-Kamikaze)
  • Cons
    • Not very actively developed (latest news from 2003), but the author is still alive lurking in the shadows (see above)

SOIL

http://www.lonesock.net/soil.html

  • Pros
    • Seems to be made specifically for OpenGL apps
    • Also very lightweight, it's in fact an extension of stb_image with support for more formats.
    • Has a screenshot function.
    • Public domain
  • Cons
    • Hasn't been updated in a long time (July 7, 2008)

MagickCore

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/magick-core.php

  • Pros
    • It's part of the imagemagick suite, must be good
    • Apache license - I suppose this is good but I haven't read the details

JuicyPixels - yes

  • Pros
    • 100% Haskell, so likely to Just Work(tm) anywhere GHC does
    • Also saves images
    • Appears to be actively developed
    • BSD license
    • Schedule for inclusion in some future version of the Haskell Platform (eg., it should continue to gain popularity)
  • Cons
    • Relatively limited API
    • Only supports a handful of common image formats
    • Relatively young library, not as time-tested as some of the C libs above

GUI

An in-game GUI library would be a nice eventual addition, but not immediately.

AntTweakBar: http://anttweakbar.sourceforge.net/doc/

Network

enet? See details here: http://enet.bespin.org/Features.html.

  • Pros
    • Most suitable for games and real-time apps
    • Implements a subset of TCP on top of UDP to allow for optional safe delivery
    • Pretty standard and battle tested
    • MIT license? http://enet.bespin.org/License.html

Q: Do we even want to provide any direct support for networking? A: Yes

Sound and Music Loading

PortAudio has little or no support for loading of formatted audio data. Therefore, we will need a library to load at least a few formats.

HCodecs?

  • Pros
    • BSD3
    • Pure Haskell (no external deps)
  • Cons
    • Not very many codecs supported
    • Last update is Nov. 2011