Functional shader programming language

Posted on:April 25 2005

About one year ago I played around with haskell, the popular functional programming language. It was a lot of fun using a functional programming language, but I never thought it could be of any real world use for me. Recently, I found Chad Austin's blog and saw that he created a functional shader programming language, named Renaissance. I've read through the paper and besides that it is damn cool, I think this could be really quite useful. I am really tempted to try it out once it is released. Another interesting piece of information: Renaissance is not the first language like this: Vertigo is built on top on Haskell and generates C# and vertex shader assembly code.

Comments:

I really enjoy haskell. I had to learn it for a concepts of programming language class where we had to learn 40+ languages and I wish I could use it more often. It seems more natural to programming it haskell than c++, java, or god forbid vb.net.

TSM

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2005-04-28 05:45:00

HLSL has a quite functional impact as well (although it isn't purely functional, still quite imperative), as well are the shader networks found in 3d modelling packages. functional programming frees from the burden of manually tracking when the hardware registers are free (and eliminating common subexpressions); most shaders are essentially cascaded functions anyways... (you can write them as a mathematical formula)

bertl

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2005-04-29 10:11:00