Max Rabkin wrote:
On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Andrew
Coppin<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
A few reasons:
1. I never knew it existed. ;-)
A good reason. However, it's good to do a quick search over Hackage
before uploading (or before writing) so you know what's out there.
Also, if you hadn't used an "AC-" prefix, you'd have had a name
collision. Is there a particular reason why you want your name in the
package name rather than just the author field?
I find it amazing that you independently chose to spell colour with a `u'.
It makes me feel better about my choice.
2. It's mind-blowingly complex.
Colour *is* complex. Which is why I'm so glad Russell O'Connor did all
the hard work for me :)
Well, no, because now I'm going to have to spend a few hours trying to
find out what CIE is before I can even use that library.
I think really it's just aimed at a different problem. It looks like
it's trying to specify actual real-world colours. [It's news to me that
this isn't fundamentally impossible...] I'm only trying to specify
colours on a computer screen. And as we all know, computer screens
aren't calibrated in any way, and the same RGB value looks different on
each display. But then, I'm only trying to write a fractal generator, so
CIE specifications are somewhat overkill here. ;-)
You can use by lib without worrying about the CIE. You can use my library
without ever importing or using the word CIE. However, the CIE stuff is
there for those who need it.
Perhaps I (maybe with some help) need to make a tutorial on the haskell
wiki to try to make it less intimidating.
3. It doesn't appear to provide arithmetic over colours.
It provides darken, blend and addition (though addition is called
mappend rather than (+)). signum, abs and fromInteger don't make a
huge amount of sense for colours.
Yeah, I implemented signum and so forth for colours and vectors, but
they're not particularly meaningful... [Insert remark here about
Haskell's numeric class hierachy.]
So mappend gives you colour addition [with the perplexing comments about
"gamut", presumably some kind of small mammal?], but there's no
subtraction? No multiplication? No linear blending?
Linear blending is done by the affineCombo function.
I think the darken function will do what you mean by multiplication
Colour subtraction can be done by adding (using mappend) a colour that has
been darkend by a factor of (-1). I don't believe there is any demand for
a colour subtraction fuction, so I don't have a name for it.
I suppose these sorts of questions can be put nicely into a short tutorial
on the wiki.
4. It's parameterised over the component type; my library is hard-coded
to
specific types for speed.
My feeling would be to trust the specializer until it lets me down.
Has it let you down in the past?
Heh, my colour library includes a custom floor implementation that talks
to the GHC primops directly because calling floor is too slow...
[In case that sounds like idle talk, I had a program go from 10 seconds
to less than 1 second just by using this function. There's a few tickets
about it on the GHC Trac.]
Certainly speed is an issue that I haven't tackled yet since I don't know
too much about how to optimized Haskell code. I was thinking of
sprinkling in some SPECIALIZE pragmas and maybe adding some RULES to make
operations more effecient. For example we could have a rule to rewrite
floor to some sort of GHC specific fast floor function. (Although that
rule probably deserves to be in some sort of more general location).
Any help in this direction would be appricated (perferably while keeping
things as portable as possible).
This all being said, the major problem my code solves is doing blending in
a linear colour space. This necessarily make converting to non-linear sRGB
for output much slower. So for people who want speed over proper blending,
then probably AC-Colour is the package they need to reach for.
Essentially the two packages do fill different niches!
BTW, the EasyRaster package looks useful.
I haven't looked at EasyRaster yet, but I got excited when I saw it
announced. :)
--
Russell O'Connor <http://r6.ca/>
``All talk about `theft,''' the general counsel of the American Graphophone
Company wrote, ``is the merest claptrap, for there exists no property in
ideas musical, literary or artistic, except as defined by statute.''
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