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3D Graphics and Foreign Interfaces
1 point by snowfarthing 5672 days ago | 3 comments
I'm currently learning Common Lisp so I could use it for computer graphics; even so, I've looked into Arc and I like what I've seen so far. While it may be a little too immature for my purposes, I nonetheless think that if I, or someone like me, could use it for computer graphics in the future, it will be useful in propelling the development of Arc forward.

With this in mind, I have some questions about Arc, that if (and/or when) answered, would make this an interesting language to use for computer graphics:

    1.  Is there a "native" Arc assembler that would allow me to write functions that could access the hardware (I would expect this would be necessary to write drivers and libraries to access 3D acceleration hardware, or even just the monitor).

    2.  Has anyone begun work on a Foreign Function Interface, so that SDL and OpenGL libraries could be wrapped up and used in Arc?


2 points by thaddeus 5671 days ago | link

This may be worth the read.

http://www.arcfn.com/2008/05/using-opengl-with-arc.html

http://www.arcfn.com/2008_06_01_archive.html

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1 point by snowfarthing 5671 days ago | link

Judging from the posts thaddeus had me read, I would conclude that working with computer graphics in Arc will certainly be interesting, once I feel up to the challenge, but for now, it's a good idea to stick with Common Lisp.

Overall, I already have the sense that Arc is a cleaner language that CL, and I look forward to seeing what it will look like when it matures! Learning right now will undoubtedly prepare me for using Arc in the future.

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1 point by akkartik 5672 days ago | link

I've just used mzscheme's FFI. Once you have a scheme function to call it's pretty easy to call from arc.

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