freeHaskellFunctionPtr

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Wed, 03 Jan 2001 12:27:20 +1100, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> pisze:

> This means that we should not provide
> 
>     castFunPtrToPtr :: FunPtr a -> Ptr b
>     castPtrToFunPtr :: Ptr a -> FunPtr b

It does not mean that, because existing C libraries are usually
non-portable and some do require using such casts, however meaningless
they could be.

> Has anybody ever used these casts?

Yes: me, for the readline library.

> As long as `FunPtr' is used for f.e.d., I don't see much use in
> these casts.  It certainly doesn't make much sense to peek and poke
> an address produced by f.e.d.

But it's used to pass either a function pointer cast to a data pointer
or a real data pointer to a function, together with an enumeration
value indicating which one is this. Ugly, but that's life.

Another example is dlopen.

We could remove these casts, but they will be used anyway: they
would have to be produced by wrapping a C function (relying on the
implementation of both in terms of Addr forever might be not the
best practice, especially if function pointers on IA-64 are 16 bits -
I'm for 90% sure about this).

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak at knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
 \__/
  ^^                      SYGNATURA ZASTÊPCZA
QRCZAK