Re: [Caml-list] SDL2 bindings, testers and feedback welcome

[Anthony Tavener <anthony.tavener@gmail.com>]

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Sounds great! This is an item in my TODO list, also as "thin" bindings via
ctypes. I agree with leaving the nice abstraction to a higher level layer --
that generally happens anyway in a nontrivial project.

I have a controller and joystick, but no force. And some apps to port to
SDL2
to test with. Most of my use is the event system. Aside from that I just set
up a window for OpenGL.

Setting things up and installing once I send this email... :)



On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 11:11 PM, Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch
> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have written thin bindings to SDL 2 using ocaml-ctypes. The binding
> is finished but should be considered unstable: it was not thoroughly
> tested and may still change as it has not been *used* yet. The purpose
> of this unstable release is to:
>
> 1) Iron out the install procedure and test on a variety of platforms.
> 2) Get feedback about the design of the binding (see below).
>
> More precisely, apart from the eventual bugs, I'm interested in
> getting feedback in the following areas:
>
> * I used an 'a result = [ `Error | `Ok of 'a ] rather than an exception
> for functions that return error codes/null is error. I tend to lean
> on exceptionless designs but I'm still unsure whether it is a good
> idea that case. One of the problems is that SDL doesn't make a clear
> distinction (at the signature level *and* in the documentation)
> between programming errors (invalid_arg), exceptional errors
> (e.g. out of memory) and non-exceptional errors (e.g. could not
> access/setup a resource).
>
> * The signature/approach of certain binding functions may be disputable
> or may need change to achieve reasonable performance.
>
> * Testing the binding to the joystick/game controller/force feedback api,
> I have none of these things in my hands.
>
> I welcome discussions/ideas about these points and the general design
> of the binding on github's issue tracker (http://github.com/dbuenzli/tsdl)
>
> Note that the philosophy of the binding is to be "thin", that is a
> mostly type-safe(r), minimal, hopefully efficient, one-to-one
> binding. This means that I'm not interested in prettyfing the C API
> like OCamlSDL does. I expect tsdl code to look like C SDL code
> (including the inconsistent naming schemes) and the binding to be used
> by programmers to build higher-level, more OCaml friendly, abstractions.
>
> To install (only tested on osx and linux so far) you'll need at least SDL
> 2.0.1
> installed on your system. Then:
>
> opam repo add erratique-u http://erratique.ch/software/opam/unreleased
> opam update && opam install tsdl
>
> On osx 10.8.5 with OCaml 4.01.0 there's a heisenbug I couldn't track so far
> (see [1] for more info). Use 4.00.1 instead for now but note that the
> binding
> takes a long time to compile (~8 min on my machine) with that.
>
> If you want to hack the sources:
>
>   git clone http://github.com/dbuenzli/tsdl
>   cd tsdl && ./build test.native && ./test.native
>
> The documentation of the binding is here:
>
>   http://erratique.ch/software/tsdl/doc/Tsdl
>
> Best,
>
> Daniel
>
> [1] http://lists.ocaml.org/pipermail/ctypes/2013-December/000027.html
>
> P.S. If anyone wonders, the existing OCamlSDL is a very good binding
> to SDL 1.X, but SDL 2.0 is an entirely new, incompatible, API. Besides
> SDL 2.0 changed to a zlib license, tsdl is under BSD3, OCamlSDL is
> LGPL.
>
>
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