Bilder is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for Image Processing, developed as a Master's Thesis project by two students at Chalmers University of Technology. The compiler takes image filter files written in the Bilder language and spits out GLSL fragment shaders along with a JSON graph to represent the order of shader execution. See our report for more information on how stuff works.
An on-line version of the compiler is available at http://bilder.htn.se. Please send us a message if something isn't working with it!
To build the Bilder Compiler (Bilder Builder), a more recent version of the GHC compiler is required (the build succeeds with an older version, but the results aren't quite right).
The following dependencies has to be met to build the compiler:
- ghc >= 7.6.1
- bnfc >= 2.5b
- happy (tested with 1.18.10)
- alex (tested with 3.0.2)
- cabal (tested with 1.16.0.2)
These (except ghc) and some other stuff needed are available in the Cabal:
cabal update
cabal install bnfc happy alex json hashable regex-posix regex-compat cgi
To compile, just run make:
make
If you don't have cabal-install installed, you can get it either from your package manager, or at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cabal-install. To install from the .tar.gz, run
sh bootstrap.hs
cabal update
cabal install cabal-install
Freshly baked binaries can be found for 32-bit and 64-bit linux architectures.
Binaries produced by make are placed under bin/, and includes the command line
version bildc and it's cgi counterpart cgibildc (see Bilder
Demo for more information for what
to do with the cgi compiler).
To compile a filter program (a bild), give it to the compiler as such:
bildc cool_image_filter.bild
As stated in the report of our thesis, the compiler does not fully implement the Bilder language, but acts as a prototype implementation supporting the essential features of image filter computation and composition. For instance, higher order functions are not fully supported, but only functions taking other functions of an image-type. Also, since the compiler targets GLSL, some of the limitations present in GLSL will propagate to the produced filters, such as the restriction of recursive functions.
The Bilder Compiler is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, see LICENSE for more information.