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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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.