This is a Haskell module for GLFW OpenGL framework (http://glfw.sourceforge.net). It provides an alternative to GLUT for OpenGL based Haskell programs.

SOE (http://www.haskell.org/soe) now depends on this package.

========= ChangeLog

• Thu Dec 20 EST 2007

  version 0.2 is repackaged to work with Cabal 1.2 or later. Now it builds and installs out-of-box on most platforms.

============ Installation

The package comes together with a (partial) source distribution of GLFW v2.6, which is compiled and installed together with the Haskell package.

It follows the standard Cabal package installation steps:

1. To configure the module, type

   runhaskell Setup.hs configure
   

   or

   runhaskell Setup.hs configure --user --prefix=DIR
   

   if you want to install the package to your user's directory instead of the system one (replace DIR with your own directory choice).

2. To build the module, type

   runhaskell Setup.hs build
   

3. To install, type

   runhaskell Setup.hs install   
   

In the process it builds all GLFW C library source code. You may use "runhaskell Setup.hs build --verbose" to see the actual compilation steps.

==== NOTE

For Windows users, you'll have to include GHC's gcc-lib directory in your PATH environment, e.g., c:\ghc\ghc-6.6.1\gcc-lib, before configuring the GLFW module, otherwise it'll complain about missing program for ld.

GHC 6.8.x is already equipped with Cabal 1.2, so everything should work as expected. But for GHC 6.6.x users, you'll have to first install the newest version of Cabal 1.2 before installing GLFW. Cabal 1.2 also requires the module FilePath to be priorly installed, which doesn't come with GHC 6.6.x.

============= Package Usage

The package is tested with GHC 6.6.1 (with Cabal 1.2.2) on all three platforms (Linux, Win32/MinGW, and Mac OS X). Though it may work with older versions of GHC or even Hugs, they are not tested.

It installs a new Haskell package called "GLFW" and the actual module to import is "Graphics.UI.GLFW". You'll need to pass "-package GLFW" to GHC if you want to compile it.

GLFW itself is well documented (see glfw/docs directory), but the Haskell module isn't. You may see the SOE.hs from the SOE package for sample usage.

Not all functions are fully tested, and there are still a few GLFW C functions missing from the Haskell module, namely the image loading and joystick ones. They'll be added in future releases.

The Haskell module also provides basic text rendering while GLFW doesn't. It comes from a free 8x16 font which is made into a TGA texture, stored as a Haskell string in the file GLFW.hs (also the reason for its big size). Text rendering is only possible with Alpha enabled. Again, see SOE.hs from the SOE package for sample usage.

GLFW doesn't work well with GHC threads, forkIO or threadDelay. So avoid them if you can.

=================== Contact Information

You may send your bug report and feature request to the package maintainer: Paul H. Liu paul@thev.net.

-- Last Updated: Thu Dec 20 EST 2007