Re: [Caml-list] SDL2 bindings, testers and feedback welcome

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

Le mardi, 17 décembre 2013 à 15:17, Florent Monnier a écrit :
> I can test it on Mageia Linux and on MS/Windows with Cygwin Terminal
> with MingW's compilator.
>  
> Should we test SDL 2.0.0 or 2.0.1 (or both?)
As long as tsdl is not released I plan to follow the latest 2.0.X, since SDL bugs get fixed in the process.

> But I would say (IMHO) that it would be good to have both, an
> exceptionfull module for beginning, and an exceptionless module for
> the rewritting of the initial drafts.

I'm not fond of diluting APIs into various incarnations, it augments the overall bureaucracy and I like to have a single way of doing things. Getting rid of handling these `Error cases seems an `ignore` or monad away so I tend to lean on keeping it the way it is now.

> > * The signature/approach of certain binding functions may be disputable
> > or may need change to achieve reasonable performance.
>  
> could you elaborate?

If you take a function like Sdl.render_draw_lines [1] a lot of copying is involved for transforming that point list into a pointer on an array of points. Hence I also provide the function Sld.render_draw_lines_ba [2] which takes the point list as a bigarray and allows to perform the call without any copying, depending on where your data comes from this can be much more efficient. Since I didn't use the binding yet, I may have missed less obvious opportunities.  

[1] http://erratique.ch/software/tsdl/doc/Tsdl.Sdl.html#VALrender_draw_lines
[2] http://erratique.ch/software/tsdl/doc/Tsdl.Sdl.html#VALrender_draw_lines_ba



> Would it be indiscreet to ask you if you wrote this code as a
> volunteer or if you got paid for it, and how much?  

1/3 (~1 week) of the code was sneaked during my stay at OCaml Labs when I was bored working on vg. The remaining 2/3 are self-funded but I need part of it for a paid project.  

Best,

Daniel