GHCI/FFI/GMP/Me madness

[Remi Turk]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 12:59:46PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> GHC's use of GMP does cause problems if you want to use GMP for your own
> purposes, or if you link with external code that wants to use GMP.  The
> real problem is that GMP has internal state, which means it can't be
> used in a modular way.  But there's not much we can do about that.
> 
> Possibilities:
> 
>   - Rename all the symbols in our GMP to be unique. (sounds hard)
and ugly

>   - Replace GMP with something else (someone is working on this, 
>     I believe).
Do you have a pointer? It sounds interesting. *see below*

>   - try to get two copies of GMP into your program by pre-linking
>     the RTS with one copy, then linking the rest of the program
>     with the other copy.  I'm being intentionally vague here - I
>     feel that this ought to be possible, but it's an ugly hack
>     at best.
I'm not sure I share your feelings about that ;) It sounds like
symbol-clash-hell. But quite possibly I'm just being ignorant.

>   - reset GMP's memory allocators before calling it from your code,
>     and set them back to the RTS allocators afterward.  Slow, but it
>     should work.  It doesn't solve the problem properly though: external
>     libraries which use GMP are still broken.
It does indeed seem to work, after a quick test. (new util.c attached)

And it does solve _my_ immediate "problem": I can surround every
gmp-operation with a gmp_begin()/gmp_end() and pretend to be
happy. (and anyway, I'm just messing around, failure merely means
I've got yet another unfinished project ;))

Part of the reason for all this messy FFIing is your post:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2004-June/006767.html

If Integers where implemented via the FFI that would make it
quite a bit easier to special-case e.g. (^) and Show for Integer.
(IIRC, GMP's mpz-to-string recently got a huge speedup, it would
be nice if GHC would automagically profit of that..)

> Cheers,
> 	Simon
> 

Happy hacking & keep up the good work ;)
Remi

-- 
Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.