wakey wakey!

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com> wrote,

> Ok folks, I decided it's time we woke this list up again.
> 
> *kick*

:-)

> Right.  I've got so many things on my ToDo list that come under the heading
> of "can't be done until the FFI library is finalized", it's getting silly.

Once this session is over - in a bit more than a month - the
FFI library is at the top of my priority list.

> STEP 1:   Addr or (Ptr a) ?
> 
> I'm convinced that Ptr a is the way to go.  After brief conversations with
> Manuel at ICFP, I think he's agreed

Definitely!

> Using "Ptr a" eliminates the need for those annoying dummy arguments to
> malloc and friends, and provides some useful type safety.  It might also in
> the future allow us to typecheck our FFI calls with respect to the foreign
> interface, but there are still issues to resolve before this can happen.

You are right that it is still open how far we can push `Ptr
a', but I think, the benefits that we already know are
convincing enough.

> I've enclosed my modified version of GHC's Storable module, and a new module
> Ptr containing the definitions of Ptr and FunPtr (ripped from Marcin's
> library mostly).  Comments are most welcome.

Re Storable: 
- So, it is decided to nuke AddrOff?
- mallocArray/mallocBytes Versus mallocElems: Isn't
  mallocBytes redundant?  mallocArray on Word8 should be the
  same, shouldn't it?

Re Ptr:
- Why call it `ptrPlusBytes' when there is no other
  `ptrPlus'? (I could imagine one, which adds multiples of
  the size of the `a' in `Ptr a'.)
- Would `freeHaskellFunPtr' replace
  `IOExts.freeHaskellFunctionPtr'? 

Otherwise, this is all perfectly fine with me.

Cheers,
Manuel