Are functional programming languages suitable for graphics programming?

Question

Just very curious about this, from my own experience , all the graphic programming seems to C or C++ related. Like the Direct10X. Does functional programming language provide so

Answer 1

Probably no one cares about this now five year old question, perhaps not even the original asker. But as an old time graphics-in-Lisp guy, I wanted to weigh in. The title mentions “graphics programming” then the question asks about libraries for game development. Worth noting that graphics programming includes many topics unrelated to game programming. (So for example doing data visualization in Clojure would be an example of “functional programming languages suitable for graphics programming” but not game programming.) There is also a distinction between function-based languages (like Lisp, where everything is a function, but side effects are allowed) and languages that are purely functional with only immutable datatypes (like Haskell or Clojure).

There have certainly been Lisp-based graphics systems written in a “multi-paradigm” style, which is to say, not purely functional/immutable. For example, I worked at Symbolics in the early 1980s, when we produced one of the first “digital content creation” (like Maya or AutoCAD) systems entirely in Lisp. My 1978 MS thesis was about a Lisp-based domain-specific-langauge for procedural animation called ASAS. We used that at triple-I (Information International Inc.) to do very early CGI work for special effects in feature films, including 1982’s TRON. (That is described in this SIGGRAPH paper.) Finally the game studio Naughty Dog programmed the game logic of several titles (Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter series?) with a Scheme inspired language called Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL).

Speaking about more modern efforts, and more strictly functional/immutable languages: “LambdaCube 3D is Haskell-like purely functional domain specific language for programming the GPU (graphics processing unit).”

In John Carmack’s keynote at Quakecon 2013, he spoke extensively (about 30 minutes) about his interest and experiments with purely functional languages for game development. His view seems to be that there are obvious benefits to using functional programming, but there are some challenges, and that he had not gone far enough down that road to have a strong opinion. He talks about experimenting with both Haskell and Lisp. This topic is between 1:17:00-1:49:00 in this video.