Possible runtime overhead of wrapping the IO monad?

[Brian Hulley]

John Meacham wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 03:50:06AM +0100, Brian Hulley wrote:
>> where the intention is that the callback will take the width and
>> height of the window and return a RenderM action, the problem is
>> that because the FFI does not allow RenderM to appear in a foreign
>> type.
>
> it should, the types in foreign declarations should "see through"
> newtypes.

Unfortunately GHC does not seem to support this:

   foreign import ccall duma_clear :: Word.Word32 -> RenderM ()

       Unacceptable result type in foreign declaration: RenderM ()
       When checking declaration:
       foreign import ccall safe "static  &duma_clear"
            duma_clear :: GHC.Word.Word32 -> RenderM ()

even though the FFI spec agrees with you (Section 3.2):

     The argument types ati produced by fatype must be
     marshallable foreign types; that is, each ati is either (1)
     a basic foreign type or (2) a type synonym or renamed
     datatype of a marshallable foreign type. Moreover, the
     result type rt produced by frtype must be a
     marshallable foreign result type; that is,
     it is either a marshallable foreign type, ...

Thus leading to all the messy fiddling about I have to do to use RenderM 
instead of IO in my imported functions and callbacks.

A tool like greencard may solve some of these problems but the problem I 
would then have is how to incorporate it in my very flaky development 
environment (I'm just using the plain text editor in Visual C++ with a 
shortcut bound to a batch file which calls ghc so the build process is all 
held together by bits of string and sellotape therefore I don't want to 
complicate it further if at all possible...)

By the way, I think I may have been wrong about GHC not optimizing the call 
to dropRenderM out of the onRender function in my last post, because when I 
look at the output using -dddump-cmm (instead of -simpl) dropRenderM is not 
mentioned in the code for onRender (although I'm not an expert at reading 
cmm output either and it is mentioned in some other places....)

Regards, Brian.