Effect of large binaries on garbage collection

Adrian Hey ahey@iee.org
Thu, 6 Mar 2003 10:55:09 +0000


On Tuesday 04 March 2003 12:36, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> GHC does not copy big objects, so don't worry about the copying cost.
> (Instead of copying, it allocates big objects to (a contiguous series
> of) heap blocks, with no other objects in those blocks.  Then the object
> can "move" simply by swizzling the heap-block descriptor.)

Thanks, looks like it's option (1) then. Could you tell me what
Haskell type I have to use be able to pass a pointer to this binary
to C land (genuine address, not StablePtr). I don't think
the standard FFI allows this at all but, IIRC, the old ghc libraries
allowed you to do this with a mutable byte array.

Regards
--
Adrian Hey