sdl-gpu-hs VS libspng

The bindings are currently source-only here. I am going to release to Hackage soon (tm), but I just haven't had the time to button it up. However, they do work great. Every game I've done for Ludum Dare except 47 (which was gloss) has used these bindings.

The guts are in the Memorable module. There are some operators in there that allow you to pluck individual fields from struct pointers in IO instead of marshaling entire structs needlessly.

The games are built on a custom "engine" made with SDL2 and some other C libraries I wrote bindings for: sdl-gpu, cute_c2, and cute_sound. I use apecs and cleff for the general architecture. And for animations, I use a combination of animate and ease.

You can't exactly allocate data in this custom memory management system, but you can get close with some type-level/generics stuff I think. I've been playing with it quite a bit for no-marshal hsc FFI bindings [1] [2], and it's worked nicely for that in raw IO. With some extra elbow grease, I can probably make it work for pure linear code too.

For example I to this day do not know if there's a library for reading specifically PNG files in a specific format. Yes, there's JuicyPixels which decodes a ByteString into some DynamicImage which may not even be the format I expect. This I guess is fine for most, but I don't want that, so I had to port libspng.

For context, I have written complete bindings to five different C libraries (freetype2, libvorbis, libspng, al, Chipmunk2D) and the question in the title may very well be the last one I have concerning FFI for quite some time. The question originates from the fact that chiphunk strips prefixes, something no other low-level library I've seen does.