If you’re planning on writing 3D software in Haskell, here are some tips.

A few months ago I was planning on programming a 3D game in Haskell and was browsing the options for a 3D library. In general, there are a couple of low-level APIs (OpenGL and Direct3D) and a few higher-level libraries built on top of those low-level APIs (OGRE, Irrlicht, and more). Using a low-level API has the known advantages (fine-grained control) and disadvantages (lots of code to write).

It turned out that limiting the programming language to Haskell is quite restrictive; almost all higher-level libraries are intended for using with C++ (Panda3D being an exception with Python as the intended language; the library itself is written in C++, though). So what you need is Haskell bindings for the libraries. There’s a Haskell binding for OpenGL, which is used for (apparently) all 3D games written in Haskell. A few months ago it was the only option and, if you’re doing anything more complicated than rendering a few models in a scene, it still is.

The problem is that binding a C++ library is rather complicated and basically boils down to either writing C code to wrap the C++ interface and then interfacing the C code in Haskell using FFI or automatically generating the C interface (as well as the Haskell FFI code that wraps it). The latter option was chosen for at least the GUI widget libraries wxHaskell and qtHaskell.

However, a few Haskell bindings for 3D libraries have appeared. There’s a very primitive binding to OGRE written by the author of this post (with examples) as well as at least a start of a binding to Irrlicht by Peter Althainz. So there appears to be a bit of activity regarding the use of higher-level 3D libraries in Haskell, which is good news, I guess.

One more note regarding the Haskell bindings for Ogre: you can do some simple things like adding models and a camera, and moving them around, but that’s about it, since I haven’t really had the motivation or need to provide support for anything else. The bindings are relatively simple to extend, though, so if you use the bindings and miss a feature, go ahead and let me know.