Revision as of 11:29, 1 May 2010
1 What is GPipe?
GPipe is a library for programming the GPU (graphics processing unit). It is an alternative to using OpenGl, and has the advantage that it is purely functional, statically typed and operates on immutable data as opposed to OpenGl's inherently imperative style. Another important difference with OpenGl is that with GPipe you don't need to write shaders in a second shader language such as GLSL or Cg, but instead use regular Haskell functions on the GPU data types. GPipe uses the same conceptual model as OpenGl, and it is recommended that you have at least a basic understanding of how OpenGl works to be able to use GPipe.
2 Examples and tutorials
- Wiki Tutorial that explains the basic principles of GPipe.
- GPipe-Examples package, by Kree Cole-McLaughlin features a set of four examples with increasing complexity.
All my GPipe related library sources are available on Github. If you have something to contribute with, just send me a patch and I might merge it into the trunk.
4 Other resources
- GLUT is used in GPipe for window management and the main loop.
- GPipe-TextureLoad package helps loading textures from disc.
- Vec-Transform package provides some useful 4x4 transform matrices.
- GPipe-Collada package makes it possible to use Collada files with GPipe.
5 Questions and feedback
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to mail me. I'm also interested in seeing some use cases from the community, as complex or trivial they may be.