[MLton] Estimate on difficulty...

[Matthew Fluet]

> I'd like to do the following demo.. basically take the ICFP raytracing
> benchmark and hook it up to a real physical render buffer so I can render
> things interactively with MLTon.

If by render buffer you mean a window (and not the graphics hardware) then
it's probably not beyond a Labor Day weekend project. ;-)

> I'd like to do this on Cygwin. Any advice on what's the least painless way
> to do the above. i.e. what simple graphics libs have already been ported to
> MLton.. is there a nice SDL binding already or do I have to do this myself?
> The more code I can crib from somone else the happier I'll be. :)
> I really just want a raw window with some keyboard and mouse input.

Anoq has some SDL bindings for MLton:
  http://www.hardcoreprocessing.com/pro/sdlml/index.html
but, they may be a little out of date.  In particular, we no longer need
any complicated cross compiling, since MLton runs on Cygwin.


There is also mGTK:
  http://mgtk.sourceforge.net/
It's fairly up to date (latest pre-release from July).  I was able compile
and run their examples with mlton-20040227 on cygwin.  It took a couple of
iterations of running  pkg-config gtk+-2.0  and and pulling down Cygwin
packages, but once that was working, I got buttons-galore.  (Contrary to
the README on the homepage, you want gtk-2.0.)


mGTK would be my suggestion.