Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] glMLite

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Monday 24 December 2007 13:34:51 Jan Rehders wrote:
> On 24.12.2007, at 09:54, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 10:57:33PM +0100, Florent Monnier wrote:
> >> OCaml bindings for OpenGL.
> >
> > Can you please compare glMLite with LablGL [1]?
>
> ... and glcaml [2] :)
>
> > [1] http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/soft/olabl/lablgl.html
>
> [2] http://glcaml.sourceforge.net/

While we're on the subject, perhaps I can productively compare LablGL and 
GLCaml:

LablGL is by far the most widely used and, therefore, tested of the OpenGL 
bindings available for OCaml. According to the package popularity contests, 
LablGL has 412 registered installs on Debian and Ubuntu. This library is 
ideal for people who are less familiar with OpenGL because it provides a 
higher-level and safer API. However, LablGL only supports OpenGL 1.

GLCaml are the most up-to-date bindings to OpenGL for OCaml, supporting the 
latest OpenGL 2 API. This library uses an OCaml program to generate the 
bindings automatically, which makes it much easier to keep up to date but 
lower-level. This library is ideal for people who require OpenGL 2 but is not 
as thoroughly tested as LablGL (no packages) and, consequently, contains 
bugs.

I'm not quite sure where Florent's bindings fit in because they lack packages 
and users like GLCaml and lack support for OpenGL 2 like LablGL.

I recently wrote several OpenGL 2 shader demos in OCaml using Elliott Oti's 
GLCaml bindings. I filed two bug reports in the process. I'm hoping the 
community can pull together to get these state-of-the-art bindings tested and 
shipped in deb packages. I'd like this to be the future of OpenGL for OCaml 
because the autogenerated bindings make the latest OpenGL features accessible 
to expert users and higher-level bindings can easily be written to help 
newbie users.

We'll refrain from writing OCaml Journal articles about GLCaml until it has 
stabilized but several people have expressed an interest in a 3D scene graph 
library for OCaml which I can create for GLCaml easily from part of Smoke's 
source code.

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