How to access hs_free_fun_ptr from a Visual Studio DLL

[Sven Panne]

Am Samstag, 25. März 2006 20:00 schrieb Brian Hulley:
> I've found a workaround to the problem below: instead of trying to use
> hs_free_fun_ptr, I instead pass a FunPtr to the Haskell function
> freeHaskellFunPtr into my DLL, and use this to free everything, finally
> using it to free itself (!) which I assume should be safe. [...]

It has been quite some time since I've worked on GHC's Adjustor.c and Hugs' 
FFI, but IIRC it is in general *not* safe to do this. On some platforms code 
is being generated dynamically for these kind of callbacks, which has already 
been freed by the time the callback returns. This might appear to work, 
depending on your processor architecture and dynamic memory management 
behaviour, but it's better not to rely on this. Perhaps the FFI spec should 
be clearer here.

I had a similar problem in for timer callbacks in my GLUT binding. They are 
one-shot and have to clean themselves up after the callback executes. The 
solution was to register the FunPtrs to be cleaned up only and do the real 
work in another "scavenger" callback, see 
http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/GLUT/Graphics/UI/GLUT/Callbacks/Registration.hs

Cheers,
   S.