[Haskell-cafe] FFI woes!

[Robert Dockins]

>>1) Finalizers are not (some say cannot) be guaranteed to run, even on
>>normal program termination, even if you force GC before exiting.
> 
> 
> I only need a guarantee that it will be run if the Ptr is no longer
> being referenced.

This is exactly the guarantee you _don't_ have.  The only guarantee you 
have is that it _won't_ be run if the Ptr _is_ being referenced.

>>I would suggest you find some way to accomplish what you want without
>>using finalizers.
> 
> 
> That would require the user to manually free up resources once they're
> not needed anymore. Something which I believe is a bit too low-level
> for my tastes.
> I basically want the user to be able to just create a sound resource
> and then play it, without having to do any book-keeping as to when the
> sound resource is not used anymore and can be released.

My concern is that this approach is a little too non-deterministic. 
Because playing sound involves HW resources, it is better to make users 
do the bookkeeping and have well-defined behavior rwt releasing resources.

That said, you can probably get what you want by using weak pointers. 
Wrap up your Ptr in a ForiegnPtr and wrap _that_ up in an abstract 
datatype, and attach a weak pointer to the ForeignPtr (make sure all 
functions that access the Ptr use 'withForeignPtr' or 
'touchForeignPtr').  Add a (Ptr,WeakPtr ()) pair to a list of "open" 
songs, which is monitored by a single clean-up thread (use an MVar for 
the list).  Return the high level value to the user; when the enclosed 
ForeignPtr is garbage collected deRefWeak on the weak pointer will 
return Nothing.  Then the clean-up thread can begin polling the song 
object to see if it is finished.  You can also poke this thread at 
program-end to force it to free all resources it knows about, so that 
your program behaves well, assuming normal termination.  Weak pointers 
are documented here:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/System.Mem.Weak.html


I think that something like this would work:



module MySongs ( Song, mkSong, something ) where

foreign .... makeASong :: whatever -> IO (Ptr ())
foreign .... doSomething :: Ptr () -> IO ()

data Song = Song ForeignPtr

mkSong :: whatever -> MVar [(Ptr,Weak ())] -> IO Song
mkSong x mvar = do
       p <- makeASong x
       f <- newForeignPtr_ p
       w <- mkWeak f ()
       l <- takeMVar mvar
       putMVar mvar ((p,w):l)
       return Song f

something :: Song -> IO ()
something (Song f) = do
     withForeignPtr f \p ->
         do doSomething p