I’m still reading through most of the FRP material online. It appears to be well suited to modelling mixed discrete/continuous systems, such as real world robots, but I’m not yet sure that this translates very well to games or graphics in practice. Games are really quite discrete systems at heart. The concept of a frame is fairly deeply embedded, and I’m not sure if the FRP style of doing thing would obfuscate this.

Yes, FRP intentionally obfuscates the discrete nature of typical game implementations. Or put differently, the intent that led to FRP is to unobfuscate the essence of the interactive behavior that typically gets implemented discretely (and imperatively) in applications like games.

A question to meditate over: Are games purely discrete systems at heart? Or maybe are programmers so in the habit of implementing games in a purely discrete fashion that we’ve come to think of games as being purely discrete at heart?

@dons Thanks, I haven’t see either before. I’ll check them out.

I’m still reading through most of the FRP material online. It appears to be well suited to modelling mixed discrete/continuous systems, such as real world robots, but I’m not yet sure that this translates very well to games or graphics in practice. Games are really quite discrete systems at heart. The concept of a frame is fairly deeply embedded, and I’m not sure if the FRP style of doing thing would obfuscate this.

Conal Elliotts ideas for how to apply it to rendering were interesting though.

* LambdaCube – Haskell: Lambda Cube 3D Engine, http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/LambdaCubeEngine

* hpysics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uziCn2SBbxs – the Google SoC project using data parallelism for a physics engine

Just demos of using a) reactive programming, and b) data parallelism, to write game engines. Proof of concept stuff.

I suppose that more practical solution would be to adopt a language like ATS, which allows one to work on a very low level but still maintaining safety (you can statically guarantee termination if you wish, for example — not that you’d want to and you can get rid of any “free freed memory” errors, etc.). It has many interesting features regarding it’s type system (that is far more expressive than Haskell’s).

Haskell OTOH is so beautiful.