Let's get this finished

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Sat, 06 Jan 2001 21:58:26 +1100, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> pisze:

> >     type CString    = Ptr CChar
> >     type CStringLen = (CString, Int)
> 
> Hmmm, yes, although pointer/length pairs are not very common
> in C and this module is a language dependent module (and so
> should be called `MarshalCString').

I added the explicit-length variants when I needed them for the Python
interface, after I realized that it's not possible to express them
with variants which always stoped on input '\0' and didn't mark the
output length besides writing a '\0'. The '\0' variants are now small
wrappers around the explicit-length variants.

> But SimonM said that he doesn't want to make errno Haskell thread
> local...

It would force wrapping every C function which may set errno in another
C function which returns the error in a thred-safe way. The wrapper
would have to check for errno and pass it in some way to Haskell
together with the proper result - either through a pointer (which needs
extra alloca per C function call) or special thread-local variables.
It would be really bad to not have thread-local errno.

> >     withObject       :: Storable a => a -> (Ptr a -> IO b) -> IO b
> 
> BTW, can't we just use `with' now.  IIRC, the only reason Marcin
> used `withObject' was because of a clash with the implicit parameter
> extension.

Indeed.

> This has been changed now, hasn't it?

Everybody agreed that "let" should be used instead of "with",
but the change has not been made yet.

> There is one exception: MarshalCString shouldn't be
> re-exported by Foreign (like CTypes).

If language separation is realistic, we would also keep errno handling
outside basic Foreign. But it yields several separate C-specific modules...

module CForeign?

It would reexport Foreign, CTypes, CTypesISO, MarshalCString and CErrors
(or whatever they will be called).

BTW, why are CTypes and CTypesISO separate?

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