[wxhaskell-users] help with wxHaskell graphics

[Conal E. <co...@co...>]

I'm redoing Pan (http://conal.net/Pan) to run multi-platform and be
easier to work on, including redoing the image effect viewer in
wxHaskell.  I'd like advice about what's a fast & fairly simple way to
fill & display a bitmap in wxHaskell.  I plan to generate gcc code that
computes and fills in an array (or memory block), and then call this
code from a wxHaskell viewer app.  I see the Bitmap & Image classes with
the function imageSetData and thought that'd be the way to go, but I
don't like the idea of separating out alpha (opacity) from rgb
(wxImage::setAlpha vs wxImage::setData).  Also, wxHaskell doesn't seem
to have any alpha support (which apparently is fairly recent in
wxWidgets).  One of the improvements I'd like this new version of Pan to
have over the old one is alpha support in reading and writing bitmaps.

Sean Seefried used OpenGL in his Pan implementation
(http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~sseefried/pan), so I know that's an option.
It seems overkill though for simply getting a writable array of pixels.

Any suggestions or relevant experience?

Thanks, - Conal