ghc 5.02.2 FFI question

[Bernard James POPE]

Hi All,

I've been playing with the FFI in GHC 5.02.2

I'm not sure if I'm using it correctly because I get a space leak
in my program.

Okay, very simply I want to construct a Haskell value from
within a C function and pass it back to Haskell. In the
following program I have an algebraic type called "Simple",
which has one unary constructor "K". The idea is to pass a Stable
pointer to K to the C code, and use rts_apply() to generate
an application of the constructor and then use getStablePtr()
to pass a stable pointer to the application back to Haskell.

version of GHC is 5.02.2, operating system is Debian linux
(woody), kernel 2.2.19, gcc version 2.95.4

Here's the Haskell code:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
   -- file: Main.hs
   module Main where
   
   import Foreign
   
   data Simple = K Double 
                 deriving (Show)
   
   -- first argument is a stable pointer to the constructor K
   -- result is a stable pointer to an application of K to a
   -- Double argument
   foreign import "leak"
                   leak :: StablePtr (Double -> Simple) -> IO (StablePtr Simple)
   
   -- this is the important bit
   callLeak :: IO ()
   callLeak = do kSPtr      <- newStablePtr K
                 simpleSPtr <- leak kSPtr
                 simpleVal  <- deRefStablePtr simpleSPtr
                 freeStablePtr kSPtr
                 freeStablePtr simpleSPtr
                 print simpleVal
   
   main :: IO ()
   main = repeatIO 100000 callLeak

   -- perform an IO action n times
   repeatIO :: Int -> IO () -> IO ()
   repeatIO n io
      | n > 0 = do {io; repeatIO (n-1) io}
      | n == 0 = return ()
      | otherwise = error $ "repeatIO: negative argument"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's the C code that implements the function leak():

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   /* file: LeakC.c */
   /* paths are hardwired at the moment */ 
   #include "/home/bjpop/ghc-5.02.2/ghc/includes/Rts.h"
   #include "/home/bjpop/ghc-5.02.2/ghc/includes/RtsAPI.h"
   #include "LeakC.h"   /* this just has the prototype for leak() */
   
   StgStablePtr leak (StgStablePtr k_Ptr)
   {
           HaskellObj k;
           StgClosure *num;
   
           /* find the data constructor K, by dereferencing     */
           /* the stable pointer to it                          */

           k = (HaskellObj) deRefStablePtr (k_Ptr);
          
           /* make some arbitrary Haskell Double value */

           num = rts_mkDouble(230489.0923);
   
           /* I'm a bit worried about this last line of code    */
           /* --- is this reasonable to do?                     */

           /* apply K to the Double and return a stable pointer */
           /* to the result                                     */

           return (getStablePtr ((StgPtr)(rts_apply (k, num))));
   }

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's how I compile things:

   ghc -c LeakC.c
   ghc -package lang -fglasgow-exts -c Main.hs
   ghc -package lang -fglasgow-exts Main.o LeakC.o

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And now some comments:

Testing indicates that memory leaks proportionally to the number
of times I call leak() (linear, I mean).

My suspicion is that either I am doing something very stupid, and or
data is not being collected completely after the stable pointers are
freed. Note that I am careful to free every stable pointer that I allocate.

I tried to dump the stable pointer table each time around to see whether
there was anything obvious. My intial investigation did not show much,
but I haven't looked too deeply.

If I don't call the leak() function, but just construct a Simple
value in the usual Haskell way the space leak disappears (even if I follow
the newStablePtr/freeStablePtr route).

The leak persists regardless of whether the result of calling the
foreign function is in the IO monad or not.

If it turns out that I am being stupid then I would appreciate some
advice on how to achieve the desired outcome but no space leak.

Alternatively, if my program is "reasonable" then I am happy to dive further
into debugging it, but I didn't want to spend any more hours trying
to find a bug if there actually isn't one to find.

Thanks heaps, and sorry for the length of the post.

Ooroo,
Bernie.