Type promotion in ccall arguments

[Fergus Henderson]

On 14-Mar-2002, Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com> wrote:
> I can't remember whether this has come up before, but to my surprise
> I've just discovered that FFI foreign import declarations don't contain
> enough infomration to be able to determine the correct calling
> convention for a given C function.
> 
> Background: recently we "fixed" a bug in GHC's native code generator
> which was exposed by the following declaration:
> 
>     foreign import ccall unsafe
>      snprintf :: CString -> CSize -> CString -> Float -> IO ()

I don't see how interfacing with a varargs function as if it had a
fixed prototype can ever be completely portable.  C permits the calling
convention to be different for varargs functions, and sometimes this is
indeed desirable for efficiency: varargs functions require caller-pops
argument passing convention, but known-prototype functions can use a
more efficient callee-pops convention.  Some C compilers have taken
advantage of this.

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