Session

A bit of Foom & F# and hardware intrinsics in CoreCLR

In this double act session, we will look at what F# offers for game developers! First, Will shares his experience building Foom – Learn what it is like building a complex system in F# with regards to rendering, interop, and parsing custom binary formats. Rendering is done with OpenGL with a helper layer on top. Interop is handled using a tool that allows inline C to be written inside F#. Parsing binary uses custom combinators similar to that of FParsec. While there are many other problems to cover, these are the three that stand out and they cover functional and object programming in F#. Second, Tanner will show some cool new tech – CoreCLR is previewing a new feature in 2.1 called Hardware Intrinsics and the best part is that they work in F#. Hardware intrinsics are a mechanism for writing architecture specific code using low level managed APIs that get compiled down into performant assembly. We will explore how a few simple changes can give a big boost to a basic software renderer written entirely in F#.