Pajama!

I am working on a new implementation, called Pajama, of the image synthesis embedded language Pan, this time generating Java applets. The advantages over Pan will be

• Easy to run examples. Anyone with Java 1.5 or better can simply visit a web page to see and interact with the examples.
• Examples run on all major platforms (wherever Java 1.5 runs), while Pan ran on Windows only.
• The Pajama compiler runs on all platforms supporting GHC and the java compiler. In contrast, the Pan compiler ran only under Windows and only with Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler. Worse yet, Pan used a GUI library (WTL) that Microsoft no longer supports. I haven't been able to run the Pan compiler for quite a while now.

The disadvantage of Pajama over Pan is speed. Trig speed is quite a bit slower, and I suspect array accesses are also. Mustang (Java 1.6) improves trig performance considerably, though only with the server JVM, but almost everyone would be using the client JVM. I hope speed improves over time. Quite a lot of Pajama is already working. I have first examples running here. More on the way.

April 13 edit: Pajama now runs on Java 1.4 and up, not just 1.5, thanks to Retroweaver, a class file rewriter. Technorati tags: Pajama, FunctionalProgramming, Haskell, GraphicsProgramming.