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Aardvark – Real-time graphics and visualization in F# (github.com/aardvark-platform)
108 points by dadt on Sept 27, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments


Tip, when posting about graphics and visualisation tooling, the first thing I want to see are screenshots and videos, not a wall of text.



Thanks, naturally I have found them before writing my comment.

The point was that on any project related to graphics programming those screenshots should be on the landing page, not necessarily all of them.

It is a question of UX, the first thing everyone usually wants to see is how it looks like, not trying to find out where is the link for examples, if it exists at all.

As for the work itself, it is a great piece of work.


I was just trying to create generative graphics in Corman Lisp [1], since it creates Windows executables, and then I stumble upon this. The Game of Life demo in the examples directory is fun. I have been playing with F# a few times a year, waiting for something like this to come along. Very exciting. I started using Julia, but several years ago Jon Harrop had a book out "F# for Scientists" a rework of his "OCaml for Scientists" book. That was 2008.

[1] https://github.com/sharplispers/cormanlisp/releases/tag/v3.1...


How I miss the days when cool new things like this built on alt languages or alt platforms was the norm for HN.


The incremental bit was recently refactored out into its own library (https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharp.Data.Adaptive) which should open up some interesting uses going forward.

There's all kinds of cool crazy stuff this is being used for:

https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharp.Data.Adaptive/wiki

https://rawgit.com/wiki/aardvark-platform/aardvark.docs/docs...


This is really cool and encouraging for someone getting started in F#.


Aaah I got reminded of aardvark - qa startup built on top the gtalk. I saw super sad when Google killed that product


As did I. I used this a lot at university and learned a lot from its solid network of users.


F# is great, but MS has decided to kill it through neglect. And the few people paid to work on it spend their time trying to keep it working with the 9000 other changes done to the rest of the tooling.


I think that's not entirely fair. While MS could definitely invest more resources in F#, I wouldn't say it's been neglected (or dying). Just to mention a few developments in recent years: 1) IDE support via Ionide in VS Code 2) Easy install with NuGet 3) cross-platform FSI supported via NET Core 4) some pretty cool updates recently around anonymous records, optional yields, nameof (just to mention a few) 5) no breaking changes (I'm aware of, anyway)

I'd say the future looks pretty bright for F#. It's really resonating with an audience that wants "functional where I want, but practical where I need".


I tend to agree with OP. I do see some improvements in F#, but a lot of effort porting those back into C#. I'm not sure if there's any pull away from F# for that effort, but there may be.


> 3) cross-platform FSI supported via NET Core

Last time I tried, I couldn't get FSI working on Linux without Mono. Did something change recently?


Yes, this is a recent-ish change. FSI is available under .NET Core 3 Preview, and someone recently mentioned that it's working under 2.2 too.


As long as that audience doesn't need any UI, SQL or application architecture design related Visual Studio tooling.


In all fairness, I haven't touched Visual Studio (for either F# or C# dev) in at least 18 months, so you're probably right.

That being said, UI isn't a strength on .NET to begin with, so I think it's unfair to point that criticism at F#. Uno seems to doing some great things though.

The F# SQL type provider, however, is great. For those who don't know, this generates design- and compile-time types based on your (live) DB schema, enabling auto-complete and compile-time type checking for SQL queries. I do agree that Ionide/VS Code support isn't quite there yet.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know what you're referring to by "application architecture design".

It's definitely not perfect - I never claimed otherwise. I'm just saying that everything points to MS increasing support for F#, not the opposite.


> UI isn't a strength on .NET to begin with

Sorry but remark only reveals lack of knowledge of what Forms, WPF and UWP are capable of, their related tooling and component libraries from the likes of Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, among others.

Practically most modern Windows applications are mix of .NET and C++ libraries accessed via C++/CLI, P/Invoke or COM/UWP.

Plain old Win32 is left for legacy, games and a couple of unicorns like Adobe's Photoshop.

Application architecture design are the tools available in Visual Studio Enterprise for end-to-end application development, and modeling mapping into code modules, also known as Application Lifecyle Management.


> Sorry but remark only reveals lack of knowledge of what Forms, WPF and UWP are capable of, their related tooling and component libraries from the likes of Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, among others.

I'm fully aware of WinForms, WPF, UWP, having built applications with all of them at one stage or another.

As far as UI frameworks go, they're serviceable - but no way am I recommending .NET just because of them (well, maybe WinForms if someone's writing that type of application).

Personal opinion, of course.




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