extended foreign decls

[Fergus Henderson]

On 02-Jan-2001, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> [This comment is a bit late, I know...]
> 
> malcolm-ffi at cs.york.ac.uk wrote,
> 
> > Fergus writes, triggered by my suggestion of "foreign value":
> > 
> > > Mercury supports this using `foreign_decls' and `foreign_code' pragmas.
> > 
> > I refrained from proposing this in an earlier mail, but I've been
> > thinking about it for a long time.  I *really* *really* want to be
> > able to insert small snippets of foreign code into the source of
> > a Haskell module.
> > 
> > GreenCard allows you to do this, via the %- or %C directives.  It is
> > one of the features I miss most about the new FFI.  I know that it
> > is always possible to write a small .c file and compile and link it
> > in separately, but with the new FFI that now seems to necessitate
> > writing an additional .h file as well.  And all for a handful of lines
> > of foreign code that could easily be kept in the Haskell source, with
> > the ease-of-comprehension benefits entailed by keeping everything
> > together that belongs together.
> [..]
> 
> I believe that functionality like this should be implemented
> by an extra tool rather than the Haskell compiler.

Doing it in a separate tool will lose efficiency in some important
cases.  If the compiler is compiling via C, then it can insert
inline C code directly in the generated code, and thus get
inlining.  But I think a separate tool would have to put the C code in
a separate C file, which would prevent inlining.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.