Conways's Game of Life in Elm

I wanted to learn some Elm so I set out to create the Game of Life.

Building it

Building from this repo requires elm 0.19. First, clone the repo locally: bash $ git clone https://github.com/brianonn/elm-life.git Cloning into 'elm-life'... remote: Enumerating objects: 50, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (50/50), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (23/23), done. remote: Total 50 (delta 21), reused 45 (delta 18), pack-reused 0 (from 0) Receiving objects: 100% (50/50), 19.36 KiB | 19.36 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (21/21), done. Change directory into the cloned repo and use the tree command to see the worktree: bash $ cd elm-life $ tree . ├── elm.json ├── images │   └── screenshot.png ├── index.html ├── LICENSE ├── Makefile ├── README.md └── src └── Main.elm There is a Makefile at the top-level. You can run make help (or simply make) to get the help text: bash $ make build (default) Build the standard version of the application debug Build the debug version of the application deps Install Elm dependancies run Run the standard version in the browser run-debug Run the debug version in the browser clean Clean all files help usage Show this help

Next run make deps to install the Elm dependancies needed to build the application. If you already have the dependancies installed you will see the output similar to below. If you do not have these dependancies already installed then you will see it download and install them.

bash $ make deps elm install elm/time It is already installed! elm install elm/random It is already installed! When you have all the dependancies installed, you can build the program with make build: ```bash $ make build elm make src/Main.elm --output=main.js Dependencies ready! Success! Compiled 1 module.

Main ───> main.js

`` The Elm compiler will create themain.jsfile from thesrc/Main.elmfile. There is aindex.htmlfile at the top-level that will load and initialize the newmain.js` file to start the Elm Application running.

Running the Game of Life in your browser

Use the command make run to launch the browser with the game bash $ make run this will launch a default browser with the index.html file. You can also simply load the index file yourself:

On MacOS

bash $ open index.html

On Linux

bash $ xdg-open index.html

Game controls

When the game is started, you will see a randomized 60x60 cell grid for the Game of Life, and a row of 3 buttons at the bottom, [Start][Step][Reset].

Press the [Start] button to start the game running. The [Start] button will change to a [Stop] button to stop the game.

Similarly, the [Reset] button is only available when the game is stopped, and it will reset the Game of Life grid to a random placement of cells. When the game is running, the [Reset] button will become a [Restart] button. Pressing the [Restart] button will immediately randomize the grid and restart the game at generation 1.

When the game is stopped, the [Step] button will become active. It is greyed out while the game is running. You can use the [Step] button to single step to the next generation and watch the game progress.

There is also a slider to adjust the game speed in 50ms increments.

The generation counter is at the bottom of the page.

Cleaning up

The command make clean will remove any built files from the local repository.

Screenshot