Luminance – ASAP

We’re almost there!

luminance, the Haskell graphics framework I’ve been working on for a month and a half, will be released very soon as 0.1 on hackage. I’m still working actively on several parts of it, especially the embedded documentation, wikis and main interface.

Keep in mind that the internal design is 80% done, but the end-user interface might change a lot in the future. Because I’m a demoscener, I’ll be using luminance for the next months to release a demoscene production in Germany and provide you with a nice feedback about how usable it is, so that I can make it more mature later on.

What to expect?

Currently, luminance works. You can create buffers, shaders, framebuffers, textures and blend the whole thing to create nice (animated) images. Everything is strongly and (almost) dependently typed, so that you have an extra type safety.

As I was developing the interface, I also wrote a new package that will be released on hackage as well: luminance-samples. As you might have guessed, that package contains several executables you can launch to test luminance. Those are just features sets. There’s an Hello, World! executable, a depth test executable, a blending one, a texture one, and so on and so forth. I’ll refactor them to make the code cleaner, but you should have a look to see what it entails to use luminance! ;)

I’ll be very open-minded about what you guys think of luminance once it gets released. Even though I’ve started writing it for my own purposes, I clearly understand that a lot of people are interested in that project. I’ve been contacted by the developers of waylandmonad to explain them the choices I made with luminance so that they can do the same thing when migrating xmonad from the Xorg technology to Wayland. If I can help in any ways, even if it’s not about luminance directly, don’t hesitate then contact me!

I can’t give you a 0.1 release milestone yet, but you should be able to install it from hackage and stackage very soon! I’ll write an article when it gets released, I promise.

In the waiting, keep the vibe. Happy hacking around!