A few words about the LambdaCube stack and goals

In the earlier posts, we mentioned several times that we imagine LambdaCube as a standalone DSL. But what would this mean in practice?

One of our long-term goals is to build a productive content authoring environment that’s based on a purely functional rendering pipeline. Who knows, it might even be feasible to package LambdaCube as a Unity plugin! Another possible application could be generating an optimised rendering component to be integrated in another game engine. In any case, interoperability is a major concern for us. Driven by this goal, we came up with the following plan for the LambdaCube stack:

The heart of this scheme is obviously the intermediate language. The frontend compiler is going to be an independent tool (available both as a plain executable and a library with at least a C interface) that should be possible to easily integrate into any build system. This tool is responsible for most of the static analysis, some trivial as well as (hopefully) clever optimisations, and also planning the allocation of resources. As a result, it turns the declarative pipeline description into a series of instructions for a virtual machine that handles GPU specific data structures as primitives, e.g. setting up the rendering context, or binding vertex buffers, textures, and framebuffers in the right order. Given this intermediate description, we can take it further in many directions, as illustrated by the figure above.

Of course, LambdaCube is not likely to be useful when you are working on the bleeding edge and need accurate control over the resources. Also, when we are on said bleeding edge, it is most likely premature to think about building high-level abstractions. Therefore, we’d like to make it clear that we don’t see LambdaCube as a one-size-fits-all solution. If we were to make a mission statement, it would go something like this: we want to cover 95% of the use cases, making even moderately complex projects easier, and not get in the way of the remaining 5%.

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