Version 0.5 released

The time has come to release a new version of LambdaCube 3D on Hackage, which brings lots of improvements. Also, the previous release is available on Stackage since the 2016-02-19 nightly. Just as last time, this post will only scratch the surface and give a high-level overview of what the past weeks brought.

The most visible change in the language is in the handling of tuples. Instead of defining them as distinct product types, the underlying machinery was changed to heterogeneous lists. As a consequence, the language is more complete, as we don’t have to explicitly define tuples of different arities in the compiler any more, and this also allowed us to simplify the codebase quite a bit. There is one gotcha though: unary tuples are a thing now, and they must be explicitly marked where they can occur (e.g. across shader boundaries). With the current syntax, a unary tuple is formed by surrounding any expression with double parentheses. You can read more about it in the language specification.

Another important change is that functions in the source program appear as functions in the generated code, i.e. they aren’t automatically inlined. Since modern GPU drivers often perform CSE during shader compilation, aggressively inlining everything puts unnecessary burden on them, so it’s probably for the better not to do it in most cases. This change also makes it much easier to read the generated code.

As for the internals of the compiler, many things were changed and improved since the last release. We’d like to highlight just one of these developments: we switched from parsec to megaparsec, which brought some performance improvements.

The online editor has a new time control feature: you can both pause the time and set it with a slider. We removed most of the custom uniforms, and now every example calculates everything using only the time as the input. As an added bonus, the LambdaCube 3D logo texture can be used in the editor as showcased by the Texturing example.

On the community side, the most important new thing is the lambdacube3d-discuss mailing list. We also added a new community page to the website so it’s easier to find all the places for LambdaCube related discussions. As for the website, both the API docs and the language specs pages received some love, plus we added a package overview page to dispel some confusion. Finally, this being the second release of the new system, we’re also introducing a changelog for the compiler.

Our short term plan is to take a little break from the compiler itself and improve the Quake 3 example. It serves both as a benchmark/testbed as well as a reality check that shows us how it feels to develop against our API. On a bit longer term, we intend to separate the compiler frontend as a self-contained component that could be used for making Haskell-like languages independently of the LambdaCube 3D project.

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