Optimise the functional tick behaviour

[mdales]

In #29 the Claudius API was extended by @Vanessa082 to add a purely functional run function, whereby each tick the application just returns a list of primitives to render rather than doing a more stateful framebuffer update.

Under the hood this is currently implemented using the Claudius framebuffer. There is an opportunity here though to be more efficient, and skip the framebuffer for this path, just rendering to SDL directly, by translating the primitives to SDL draw operations. I did a partial proof-of-concept of this https://github.com/mdales/claudiusII/blob/main/src/base.ml#L26-L50

The challenges:

• Working out how to map all the Claudius primitives to SDL (I only did a few in my test)
• How to add this second draw path without making base.ml impossible to navigate
• How to do it so that Browser version via Wasm rather than SDL2 #9 can do the same trick

[Vanessa082]

Good morning @mdales I guess this is also to reduce heap allocation, right?

[Vanessa082]

@mdales, please, can you make me understand better is this eliminates the need for run_funtional, by implementing this, we will bypass the framebuffer

[Vanessa082]

@mdales I would love to understand and work on this issue please any resource to read on sdl and wasm I am not familiar with both.

[mdales]

@Vanessa082 you're at the same level as me at this point - I'm not an SDL expert and I've just understood enough to do the prototype in the example code I linked to. The documentation for tsdl isn't that easy to navigate, but that link will take you to the page I normally reach for, and then there is the SDL2 documentation also. But as I say, at this point you now know as much as me :)

In general, there's two ways to approach work, each works for a different type of person: you can be a specialist in a field, where you get to know everything well and can be very efficient in that topic, or you can be a generalist, where you know less on any given topic but can move around quite a bit, but that means you are forever having to search for documentation and learn as you go. I'm definitely in the second category :)