[Haskell-cafe] Win32 Open GL / Glut Applications

[Sven Panne]

On Friday 21 September 2007 20:19, Ronald Guida wrote:
> John Wicket wrote:
>  > yea, that is probably what I need.  Can you post in a step-by-step way.
>
> Here is a set of instructions for what I had to do to get FreeGLUT
> working with GHCi [...].

Oh dear, a long a sad story... :-(

> [...]  Although I just don't understand why freeglut, the
> Haskell GLUT library, and GHCi won't work together in the first place.

That statement is not correct, they *do* work together. The problem you are 
experiencing is that the GLUT version used to build the GHC installer/binary 
distro is obviously not freeglut, but "classic" GLUT. As long as you only 
use "classic" GLUT features, this is OK. Things get really hairy when you 
want to use freeglut-only features and still have a GHC installer/binary 
distro which is guaranteed to run with "classic" GLUT as well (with 
restricted features in the latter case, of course). To do this properly, the 
GLUT package has to resolve freeglut-only API entries dynamically, but 
glutGetProcAddress is not contained in lots of GLUT DLLs out in the wild 
(it's in GLUT API version 5 plus freeglut). This is really a pity and a big 
design flaw in GLUT IMHO, but there is not much one can do about that.The 
only thing left is to load the GLUT/freeglut dynamic library, 
well, "dynamically" and resolve the freeglut API entries by hand. Doing this 
is not hard, but a little bit tricky to get right portably: Use dlopen/dlsym 
on most *nices, LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress on Windoze, something else on Mac 
OS, take care of possible leading underscores, etc. etc. I really wanted to 
avoid doing this, but it looks like there is no way around it. Given the 
current time frame for the GHC 6.8.1 release, I don't think that it is 
feasible to get this into that release, because I would need feedback from 
lots of platforms to be sure things work.

> [...] darcs-1.0.9
>   http://darcs.net/darcs-1.0.9.tar.gz [...]

There are darcs binaries for Windows, so there is no need to build it and the 
libraries it needs:

http://wiki.darcs.net/DarcsWiki/CategoryBinaries#head-c7910dd98302946c671cf63cb62712589b392074

Furthermore, darcs itself is not needed for what you want to do.

> [...] Freeglut-2.4.0
>   http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/index.php#download [...]

The freeglut project currently doesn't provide prebuilt binaries, so this is 
hardly the GLUT package's fault. ;-) Furthermore, the official way to build 
the project on Windows is via MSVC, and there are projects files for this. 
Building a DLL via MinGW/MSYS would be nice, too, so perhaps you could post 
your patches in the freeglut-developer mailing list. I think that there will 
be a new freeglut release soon, perhaps I can push people to make at least a 
simple ZIP file with the binaries for Windows available on the project pages.

> GLUT-2.1.1
>   You need to use darcs to download GLUT-2.1.1.
> [...]
>        Locate the line start starts with "build-depends:" and remove
>        the dependencies "array" and "containers"

Now you enter the great world of Cabal versionits and the Big Library Splitup 
(tm). ;-) If you want to use a bleeding edge version of GLUT, you need a 
bleeding edge version of GHC and the libraries coming with it. A released 
version is available via hackage.haskell.org.

>   [...] 6. Modify "GLUT-2.1.1/Graphics/UI/GLUT/Extensions.hs" as follows:
>
>        Look at the last two lines:
>
> foreign import ccall unsafe "hs_GLUT_getProcAddress" hs_GLUT_getProcAddress
>
>    :: CString -> IO (FunPtr a)
>
>        Change "hs_GLUT_getProcAddress" to "glutGetProcAddress"
>
>   7. Modify "GLUT-2.1.1/cbits/HsGLUT.c" as follows:
>
>        Look for "void* hs_GLUT_getProcAddress(char *procName)" and
>        remove the whole function.

Huh? If you *really* compile against the freeglut header, these steps are 
unnecessary. What is the reason for this change?

> {...]
>   11. In GHC's directory, there is a file named "package.conf".  This
>       file contains one extremely long line.  You need to find an
>       editor that will let you insert some text into this line without
>       introducing any line breaks.  Emacs can do this.
>
>       You need to locate the text << pkgName = "GLUT" >> and then you
>       need to locate << hsLibraries = ["HSGLUT-2.1.1"] >> to the right
>       of there.  The very next thing to the right of "hsLibraries"
>       should be << extraLibraries = [] >>.  You need to change it to
>       << extraLibraries = ["freeglut"] >>.

This is unnecessary if you install the freeglut DLL correctly. What is the 
output of "ghc-pkg describe GLUT" before this modification?

>   13. If you want to /compile/ with GHCi, then you'll need to copy the
>       freeglut.dll file into the same directory as your newly-compiled
>       program.exe file.  I haven't tried static linking yet; that
>       would require recompiling freeglut as a static library instead
>       of a DLL.

The "traditional" way is to put the DLL as "glut32.dll" into your 
WINDOWS/system32, just next to opengl32.dll. :-P I don't know what the 
Vista-approved way of doing this is, and probably the freeglut project needs 
an installer. Any volunteers?

Cheers,
   S.