ANN: OpenGLAda 0.5 released

ANN: OpenGLAda 0.5 released

[Felix Krause]

It has been a long time since I released an OpenGLAda version, and an 
even longer time since I announced it here. After laying around 
abandoned for quite some time, there was interest in OpenGLAda in the 
recent year, so I decided to put some work into it. The result is a new 
release that's available on GitHub as usual [1].

OpenGLAda is a wrapper for OpenGL, GLFW, FTGL and SOIL. It also 
includes functionality to load OpenGL function pointers at runtime 
similar to what the GLEW library does for C. As thick binding, it tries 
to make working with the OpenGL API as painless as possible.

In this release, the major change is that I rewrote the runtime-loading 
part to be more efficient. A welcome side effect is that I can now 
autogenerate a complete list of wrapped OpenGL functions along with 
code pointers to where in the OpenGLAda API the functionality can be 
found [2].

Since users struggled to get the demo programs to work, I included 
detailed instructions about how to setup dependencies in the Readme 
[3], especially for Windows (with GNAT GPL or TDM-GCC). I hope this 
makes the library more accessible for newcomers.

Thanks to Roger Mc Murtrie who contributed a lot to this release, there 
are now a lot of additional examples available besides the demo 
programs. These examples are taken from textbooks and translated into 
Ada. A good part of those examples have been taken from the OpenGL 
SuperBible [4] which is written for modern OpenGL, so they are most 
relevant for people who do want to use OpenGL 4.x functionality.

The examples have been tested and work on Windows 10 with both GNAT GPL 
2017 and TDM-GCC-64, as well as on macOS High Sierra with GNAT GPL 
2017. Sadly, I gave up on setting up a VM for testing on Linux (OpenGL 
support was too much of a pain to set up in the VM), so I could not 
test it on Linux, but I doubt that something has broken there since my 
last test. I would still be thankful for someone to test it.

Development is still ongoing and the next release will probably see the 
inclusion of a binding to parts of the FreeType library as FTGL is 
pretty dated and does not play well with modern OpenGL functionality. 
FreeType is necessary to render text using OTF/TTF fonts.

 [1]: https://github.com/flyx/OpenGLAda/tags
 [2]: http://flyx.github.io/OpenGLAda/mapping.html
 [3]: 
https://github.com/flyx/OpenGLAda#detailed-installation--compilation-instructions 

 [4]: http://www.openglsuperbible.com

-- 
Regards,
Felix Krause

Re: ANN: OpenGLAda 0.5 released

[Robert Eachus]

On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 5:11:19 PM UTC-4, Felix Krause wrote:
> It has been a long time since I released an OpenGLAda version, and an 
> even longer time since I announced it here. After laying around 
> abandoned for quite some time, there was interest in OpenGLAda in the 
> recent year, so I decided to put some work into it. The result is a new 
> release that's available on GitHub as usual [1].

Very nice and worthwhile work.

I stay away from doing the graphics parts of applications.  I tend to work on the guts of inner loops spread across multiple CPUs without displays.  The windowing is for the user interface, and tends to run on user workstations.

I was wondering if you have looked at Vulkan?  Again, for my purposes your binding is a nice to have guide, but way to heavy to use.  I'm trying to migrate some compute cores to GPUs when I'm healthy. :-(

Re: ANN: OpenGLAda 0.5 released

[Luke A. Guest]

Robert Eachus <rieachus@comcast.net> wrote:

> 
> I was wondering if you have looked at Vulkan?  Again, for my purposes
> your binding is a nice to have guide, but way to heavy to use.  I'm
> trying to migrate some compute cores to GPUs when I'm healthy. :-(
> 


I have a start in this, I really must get back to it, sigh, but motivation
is lacking recently 😗🙁

Re: ANN: OpenGLAda 0.5 released

[Shark8]

Awesome! / Thank you for your work.

Re: ANN: OpenGLAda 0.5 released

[Felix Krause]

On 2017-10-22 19:07:01 +0000, Robert Eachus said:
> 
> I was wondering if you have looked at Vulkan?  Again, for my purposes 
> your binding is a nice to have guide, but way to heavy to use.  I'm 
> trying to migrate some compute cores to GPUs when I'm healthy. :-(

No, I simply don't have any use-case that would justify allocating time 
for learning Vulkan. However, I did do an OpenCL binding a while back, 
it is still available:

 http://flyx.github.io/OpenCLAda

Since I did not update it for years, it is still stuck at OpenCL 1.0.

-- 
Regards,
Felix Krause