ByteArr# - nullByteArr# anyone?

[Simon Marlow]

John Meacham wrote:
> I would like to create a datatype that contains some memory managed by
> the GHC runtime, the natural fit is ByteArr#, however, in the common
> case, the ByteArr# won't actually have anything in it. would it be
> possible to have a single constant 'nullByteArr#'? I can't define a top
> level value of type ByteArr# and creating these values is in very
> performance critical code so I am not quite sure what to do. It would
> also be nice if byteArrContents# returned 'nullAddr#' for such byte
> arrays, but it is not a strict requirement. 

I guess you could use nullByteArr# = (unsafeCoerce# True) - that shouldn't cause 
anything to go horribly wrong if you don't do any operations on it.  If you want 
a way to tell whether a particular ByteArr# is nullByteArr# or not, then we'd 
have to elaborate the implementation of byteArrContents#.  None of this is 
particularly hard, if I've understood it correctly.

Cheers,
	Simon