Lane's Blog

It seems like it should be possible to have some kind of GUI library in which user interface elements can be painted onto the screen frame-by-frame, instead of the common practice of assembling an object-oriented hierarchy of widgets.

I’m thinking of something like (rough ECMA-like pseudocode):

static var clicks = 0;

drawRectangle( 0, 0, 100, 100)
drawText( 0, 50, "This button has been clicked " + clicks + " times" )
drawClickListener( 0, 0, 100, 100, function() { clicks++ } )

Now we should be able to wrap this “button” inside affine transformations and clipping operations. We would call and draw the button during each frame of animation, and the button would cease to exist on the first frame in which it stopped being called.

I’m not looking for a revolutionary GUI paradigm; I just want the ability to do some specific, weird effects when the situation calls for it. For example, a car driving by with a clickable button on it’s side. If the button is behind a tree in the same scene, then it shouldn’t be click-able.

In fact, ideally, drawing user interface elements would use the same path as drawing visible shapes, but would pass in an event handler instead of a color or fill pattern. I could even imagine that there would be one or more channels of callback information alongside the RGB channels.

This is in the category of “things that I can’t possibly be the first person to think of but haven’t actually ever seen done.”

An Androsynth standing in front of a stargate.

When you are done on a planet, step through a gateway to move to the next one.

I’ve been playing around with an Arrow concept, which to my knowledge is original. I’ve decided to call this a FactoryArrow:


newtype FactoryArrow m n a b = FactoryArrow { runFactory :: m (Kleisli n a b) }


Where m and n are Monads. m is a single-pass initialization monad, while n is a multiple-pass working monad. The arrow supports all of the standard accessory arrow typeclasses, including ArrowLoop if n implements MonadFix, and ArrowApply if m and n are the same.

This arrow simply captures a two-phase initialize-and-run design pattern.

To the best of my imagination, there cannot be a corresponding useful FactoryMonad. I would be extremely interested if anyone can contradict me on that point.

My current interest is in using the FactoryArrow as a replacement for the mealy-style arrows by using IORefs (or potentially even STM transaction variables) to store automaton states instead of unevaluated thunks.

The corresponding implementation as of the time of this writing.

Last night I checked out Scott E. Dillard’s Vec library. It’s a good, fast, pure implementation of the basic matrix operations applicable to 3D graphics. Switching to Vec has shaved off quite a bit of time from one of my demo apps and relieved me of the need to maintain my own matrix manipulation code, which was causing me repeated headaches.

It’s very heavy with MPTCs, fundeps, and type families, which will cause ghc to render some pretty inane error messages, but if you’re already accustomed to this then it’s actually very straightforward to use.

Provides cooperative task prioritization.

The priority-sync package on hackage.haskell.org.

$ cabal install priority-sync

$ git clone http://www.downstairspeople.org/git/priority-sync.git

Feedback will be greatly appreciated. This package is a spin-off from my work on roguestar, where I need to do significant background processing while retaining enough resources to perform smooth animation.