Haskell or Ocaml with OpenGL and SDL precompiled distribution for Windows

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

它不是SDL，但是GLFW通过Cabal与Haskell一起在Windows上运行。

Answer 5

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.