#gpipe

I managed to get Haskell/GPipe to output gifs! Now I can share my progress as I work on something more substantive.

This animation demonstrates transformations through coordinate spaces for model, world, camera, and clip positions. In addition, the little sine wave is a dynamic mesh uploaded to the GPU before each frame. GPipe doesn't yet support geometry shaders.

Over the past year I've been porting the C++/GLSL examples from Jason L. McKesson's Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming into Haskell using a peculiar OpenGL library called GPipe.

GPipe [github] [hackage] is Tobias Bexelius' framework for expressing OpenGL buffers, uniforms, vertex shaders, fragment shaders, and draw-calls in normal pure Haskell code. His framework elegantly models the entire graphics pipeline and hides most of the some 250 state-mutation functions that comprise the OpenGL C API.

I started off with no experience using either Haskell or OpenGL. Initially it seemed that I had fread more than I could fit in my brainbuffer, but after an embarrassing amount of re-reading documentation and re-writing the same tutorials repeatedly, I think I understand enough to share. Last week I completed Tutorial 6, in which you create an articulated robotic arm. For a seasoned Haskeller this might've been easy, but I still felt proud.

Today I've published the first 6 ports on GitHub. I'm making a second pass to clean the code up, and then I'll continue to delve into the unknown of functional graphics programming!