Yeah, Haskell was an interesting choice. I started working on it _because_ it was a Haskell project.
Overall it was a pretty rough road, but someone has to go first and I'd really like for Haskell graphics to take off.
I ended up writing bindings for Godot so we didn't have to deal with graphics stuff from scratch (like in the first few iterations).
While this lost us some of Haskell's benefits and it's not super functional-y, it's still nice to work with and most of the issues we encounter are related to the bindings being unpolished.
If you have any questions about doing this kind of project in Haskell, hit me up.
Packaging this was an absolute nightmare due to various distributions shipping incompatible library versions and so on.
Nix, despite issues with everything OpenGL related, was the only thing that actually worked. And Cachix made installation really fast.
PS: if it starts building for some reason during the install process, let us know. We've tested it on various machines but due to some peculiarities specific configurations might require a rebuild even with Cachix. We can add that to the repo so that future installs and updates are faster.
That’s weird, wasn’t Simula 2 the first OO language? This Simula doesn’t seem to be related at all. I get name reuse, but this Simula is one of those huge milestones in computer science.
Yes, it was introduced in 1967 as a successor to Simula 1 and the language was called Simula 67. It influenced subsequent OO languages like CLU, C++, Java, and Smalltalk.
Barbara Liskov lent me a book that described it in 1973 and recommended that I read about Simula 67 before starting to work on a small part of the the CLU compiler design. I believe the book was Structured Programming by Dijkstra, Hoare, and Dahl. It had a chapter by Dahl describing Simula 67.
What is the reason you went with the name in the first place? Simula is the first part of simulation (which Simula was specialized in expressing), but I'm not seeing a simulation aspect here. Maybe an inside design inspiration relating to VR and simulating reality? Or maybe named after a village in Estonia?
"Simula" reminded me of the word "Simulation" or "Simulate", and had a good Matrixy feel to it. We're open-minded to a name reboot as we get further off the ground.
Right now we're working on perfecting Linux VR Desktop (for 2D apps), but the long-term goal is to bring forth killer office VR apps (for productivity, not gaming/entertainment) that wouldn't otherwise be possible in normal 2D Linux. These apps will likely take advantage of VR as an amazing "Simula[ting]" environment.
