Re: [Caml-list] Smoke on 3.09.2

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Sunday 25 November 2007 20:12, Vu Ngoc San wrote:
> Thanks, now it builds fine. And I really thought the problem was gone;
> After resizing the window madly, I was just trying to anwser that
> everything was ok when it suddenly froze exactly as before. :-(
>
> It's maybe a bug of my video driver (xorg-intel). However, I tried to
> reproduce it with glxgears and I couldn't.

Ok. That was a common problem cited by our users before, particularly with 
regard to ATi cards rather than Intel. Perhaps nVidia cards should be a 
requirement under Linux. Hopefully Mac OS X can handle all of the cards that 
it supports.

Have you tried using software rendering via Mesa rather than xorg-intel?

Do you use any other OpenGL software on a regular basis?

> Btw: I don't know if it is useful or not, but your 'clicking and zooming'
> in the tiger demo is quite nice

Yes. Smoke is based upon the hierarchical decomposition of vector scenes into 
non-overlapping tesselations that can be cached on the graphics card. This 
underpins its performance, which is typically an order of magnitude faster 
than Cairo, Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. Consequently, Smoke is 
ideal for building responsive vector GUIs and OCaml makes it a dream to work 
with.

We've been sitting on the OCaml implementation of Smoke for several years and 
problems like these are preventing us from commercializing it successfully. 
This is a great shame because OCaml is an excellent language for graphics 
programming. I believe the best solution would be an OpenGL-enabled OCaml VM.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e