This will be a short announcement about al, a Haskell wrapper to the OpenAL C library.
Currently, the wrapper has been successfully tested on Linux – at least it works well on my Archlinux distro. I made a little program that reads from an .ogg file and streams the PCM signal to the wrapper – see libvorbis for further details. I’ll release the program later on if I find the spare time.
The wrapper might also work on Windows as long as you have pkg-config installed. I’d be very happy with feedback from people working on Windows. I don’t want anyone be put apart with my packages.
However, I’ve never tested the wrapper on Mac OS X. I
guessed it wouldn’t work out of the box because Mac OS X
doesn’t use regular libraries to compile and link – that would
have been too easy otherwise, and hell, think different
right? They use something called a framework.
It’s possible to include a framework in a Haskell
project by fulfilling the frameworks field in the
.cabal file. I received a simple patch to do that – here,
and I merged it upstream.
Then, Mac OS X is now officially supported. The release version is the 0.1.4.
There’s something else I’d like to discuss. Quickly after the
first release of al, I
decided to push it onto stackage. Unfortunately,
there’s a problem with the package and Ubuntu. For a very
dark reason, Ubuntu doesn’t expose anything when invoking
pkg-confg --cflags, even if the files are there – on
Ubuntu they can be found in
/usr/include/AL.
That’s very silly because I don’t want to hardcode the location
– it might be something else on other Linux distro. The problem
might be related to the OpenAL support in
Ubuntu – the .pc file used by
pkg-config might be incomplete. So if you experience
that kind of issue, you can fix it by passing the path to your
OpenAL headers:
If OpenAL is installed somewhere else, consider using:
I’ll do my best to quickly fix that issue.