Reason

[donnieflorence]

Hello,

I'm starting out with reason and I have a few questions about rewitness.

1. What gl library are you using? I see labgl is that reason?
2. How do you open a window in reason? I ask because rewitness opens a window and not sure how you do this in reason been googling how to do this but couldn't figure it out and I can't seem to find where in the code you do this.
3. I come from javascript and I'm wondering how you handle layout in reason. In web dev theres html and css. Is there something like this in reason?

[Schmavery]

Hey @donnieflorence,
Before I answer your questions, I want to set some expectations and make it clear that taking the same approach that rewitness uses here will be very similar to programming using opengl or webgl.

1. In master, we're using lablgl which is a thin opengl wrapper for ocaml/reason. In the native-web branch, we're using a library we're working on called regl. This allows us to compile UI code to both native and web (js). Labgl isn't going to work if you ever want to compile your reason code to run on web, I'd recommend using regl as it's cross platform solution and we'd be really happy to help with it

2. In master, we're using lablgl (with sdl2) to open a window here. In the regl version, we expose a different interface which is used here. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just copy pasting these lines to get something on the screen.

3. Right now the layout/graphics situation is a work of progress in reason. Rewitness uses a low level interface to opengl/webgl in order to display things on the screen. This means that any layout logic has to be hand-written (along with shaders etc). We're working on putting together a higher level api to allow more ease of use. There is some work by other people to support ReactNative and things like that in reason, which may be more what you're looking for.

You might also be interested in looking at relayout to get some examples of people solving the layout problem in reason. It's a reimplementation of css flexbox in reason, but just handles the layout logic, not display.

I hope this doesn't crush your dreams of programming UI in reason and I'd love to answer any more questions you have.

[Schmavery]

@donnieflorence if you're interested in getting into ocaml/reason I'd highly recommend hanging out in the discord channel (discord.gg/reasonml) and letting us help you with all your problems. You can even message @bsansouci or me directly (same usernames on discord) if you get stuck. It's a really friendly group of widely varying skill levels and all we want is to help people. We totally get that it's really rough getting started in reason right now, there's a lot of work to be done and we don't want to scare anyone away. I think you'll find there are a lot of people who are either in your position now, or remember what it was like (I sure do!).
Me and @bsansouci are seriously looking into a number of options for making coding UI easier in reason and we'd love the input of anyone on what would be useful.
Don't be a stranger! ❤️