Re: SLAYER announcement and help request for preparing a GNU package

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

2013/5/7 Javier Sancho <address@hidden>

Panicz Maciej Godek wrote:
> I even managed to build it, but for some reasons the demos won't run. I get
> the following error:
> gacela/video.scm:175:2: In procedure init-gl:
> gacela/video.scm:175:2: In procedure module-lookup: Unbound variable:
> set-gl-hint

The reason is, oh my god, you are the first who test my code.

:) I guess that's how it begins.

I'm trying to build a portable package for slayer, and I must say that in a way it's much more difficult than programming (which is actually a great pleasure) -- there's a lot of reading and figuring out how to 'get it right'

When I started this project, I made demos and some documentation, but
I stopped maintaining them because nobody was interested. Makefiles
compile OpenGL and SDL bindings, but now I use Figl and compilation is
not needed. The error with set-gl-hint comes because I have a figl
version with some improvements. I've sent patches to figl maintainers.

 

I've applied all three patches, and I got a new error:

gacela/games/guybrush$ ./guybrush.scm 

[xcb] Unknown request in queue while dequeuing

[xcb] Most likely this is a multi-threaded client and XInitThreads has not been called

[xcb] Aborting, sorry about that.

guile: ../../src/xcb_io.c:178: dequeue_pending_request: Assertion `!xcb_xlib_unknown_req_in_deq' failed.

Abort (core dumped)

gacela/games/tetris$ ./tetris.scm 

XIO:  fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0.0"

      after 129 requests (128 known processed) with 18 events remaining.

Currently, Gacela is in a very unstable state. Demos, for example, use
an old version with a more OOP style, because when I wrote them I was
beginning to understand Lisp and functional programming. But actually
I'm reestructuring all the code looking for a more elegant, beatiful,
functional style.

I don't think those two paradigms rule each other out. I believe that games and user interfaces are the cases where OOP feels at home, but it seems a good practice to avoid mutable variables wherever they're unnecessary. I think John Carmack is quite just in this regard: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programming-in-c/

 

> If it comes to code, I see that you have a more polling-style approach for
> processing input. My desire is to get a system that never stops being
> reconfigurable -- to truly separate the user interface from program logics.
> I don't know if it's achievable, but I have a feeling that such direction is
> worth exploring

Yes, your style is more callback style. I personally prefer polling
because then I can read the code sequentially. But it's a personal
consideration.

> All these concepts sound very interesting, but I'm curious whether they are
> reflected the code somewhere.

For the moment, no. But I have a lot of papers :-)

I'm curious where will it go :)

regards