Installing GLUT package on Win32

[Ronald Guida]

I am trying to install freeglut and the Haskell GLUT package on my
Windows XP machine, and I just can't get it to work.  I am wondering
if anyone else has tried to install freeglut and the Haskell GLUT
package on a Windows XP machine.

Here's a summary of what I tried so far:

I downloaded freeglut and successfully compiled it with Visual Studio
2003.  I found out that in order to compile the GLUT package, I need a
unix shell, so I installed MinGW, MSYS, and MSYS-DTK.  Naturally, I am
from the world of Windows, so the unix shell is a whole new foreign
world for me.

I downloaded the GLUT package from [1] and tried to compile it.  The
compile succeeded, but the package would not work.
[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/GLUT/2.0/GLUT-2.0.tar.gz

Eventually, I found out that the latest version of GLUT is GLUT-2.1.1,
and in order to get it, I need to use darcs.  Bear in mind, I started
learning Haskell a few months ago, and up to this point I simply had
not yet heard of darcs.

Darcs is available in pre-compiled form for several systems, including
Win32/cygwin, but not Win32/MinGW.  I downloaded the sources for
darcs, zlib, and curl, and eventually get darcs to compile.

Finally, I downloaded GLUT-2.1.1 with the command:
 $ darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/libraries/GLUT/

When I tried to compile this, I was told that I have two missing
dependencies: "array" and "containers".  So I performed a "darcs get"
on the array library and tried to compile it.  It failed to compile.

Eventually, I edited the GLUT.cabal file to remove the "array" and
"containers" dependencies, and got GLUT to compile, but the library
still doesn't work.

When I attempt to compile a program that uses glut, and link with
"freeglut.dll", as produced by VS-2003, I get linker errors.

In addition, I tried to compile freeglut under MinGW, but it failed to
compile as well.

Again, the unix world, including the shell, the conventions, and the
toolchains, are all foreign to me, so for all I know, I could be
completely missing something that's both obvious and fundamental.

Thank you for any help anyone can provide.
-- Ron

P.S. Are there any alternatives to GLUT/freeglut, that work with
Haskell, and that are /easy/ to install on a Windows box?

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[Ronald Guida]

Good news:

On the haskell-cafe mailing list, Paul L wrote:
 > But again, why stuck with GLUT? Now there is at least one alternative,
 > GLFW (http://glfw.sourceforge.net) a cross-platform framework for
 > OpenGL applications, for which I recently wrote a Haskell interface,
 > downloadable at http://www.haskell.org/soe/software1.htm. It's
 > certainly experimental though. The GLFW C library itself is well
 > documented, but the Haskell module still isn't. The only example so
 > far is the soe.hs in the SOE package.

I abandoned GLUT and looked at GLFW.  I had similar problems getting
GLFW to work with GHC and GHCi.  After a bunch of hacking, I got GLFW
to work for me.

I have to invoke GHCi with the command line [1] and I have to invoke
the compiler like [2], but hey, it works :)

 [1] "ghci <myfile.hs> glfw_hack.o -lopengl32 -lglu32"
 [2] "ghc --make <myfile.hs> glfw_hack.o -lopengl32 -lglu32"

-- Ron

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