DSL in the wild

After a few months of radio silence, the first public version of the new LambdaCube 3D DSL is finally available on Hackage. We have also updated our website at the same time, so if you want to get your hands dirty, you can head over to our little Getting Started Guide right away. The rest of this post will provide some context for this release.

The summer tour was a fun but exhausting experience, and we needed a few weeks of rest afterwards. This paid off nicely, as development continued with renewed energy in the autumn, and we’ve managed to keep up the same pace ever since. The past few months have been quite eventful!

First of all, our team has a new member: Andor Pénzes. Andor took it upon himself to improve the infrastructure of the project, which was sorely needed as there was no manpower left to do it before. In particular, this means that we finally have continuous integration set up with Travis, and LambdaCube 3D can also be built into a Docker image.

It is also worth noting that this release is actually the second version of the DSL. The sole purpose of the first version was to explore the design space and learn about the trade-offs of various approaches in implementing a Haskell-like language from scratch given our special requirements. It would be impossible to list all the changes we made, but there are a few highlights we’d like to point out:

• The speed of reduction is greatly improved.
• Reduction is based on partial evaluation.
• We have a much more expressive type system with a faster inference algorithm.
• Pattern match compilation is based on new research.

We had an all-team meeting in December and after some discussion we came up with a detailed roadmap (disclaimer: this is a living internal document) for the first half of 2016. Without the gory details, this is what you should expect in the coming months:

• A new release is planned for every 2-3 weeks. In the current roadmap, every release would bring improvements across several areas, e.g. compiler internals, language features, editor usability, backend performance, new target platforms.
• We have explicitly left some time for improving documentation (guides and references) and keeping it up-to-date with the releases.
• As a feature milestone, we’d like to get to a point where it’s possible to write a small game for a mobile platform by the summer (we already have a working iOS example, but it’s far from production ready).

Everything said, this is an early release intended for a limited audience. If you happen to be an adventurous Haskell programmer interested in computer graphics – especially the realtime kind – and its applications, this might be a good time for you to try LambdaCube 3D. Everyone else is welcome, of course, but you’re on your own for the time being. In any case, we’re happy to receive any kind of feedback.

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