scope of header files

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

If, following this thread, you conclude that GHC should do something different than what it does, can you submit a Trac ticket?  With a small example?

Thanks

S

| -----Original Message-----
| From: glasgow-haskell-users-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:glasgow-haskell-users-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
| Duncan Coutts
| Sent: 06 March 2008 00:24
| To: Ross Paterson
| Cc: glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
| Subject: Re: scope of header files
|
|
| On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 23:46 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
| > On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 11:16:14PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
| > > I was under the impression that with ghc, ffi import declarations like
| > > this do not escape the module:
| > >
| > > foreign import ccall unsafe "foo.h foo" foo :: IO ()
| >
| > GHC can inline the stub across module (and thus package) boundaries,
| > so the #include can escape.
|
| I've been informed before that:
|
| foreign import ccall unsafe "foo" foo :: IO ()
|
| can escape and needs -#include on the command line and for all client
| code. However for ghc:
|
| foreign import ccall unsafe "foo.h foo" foo :: IO ()
|
| does not escape because ghc does not track which .h file should be
| #included later. It's not that it couldn't escape according to the FFI
| spec but that ghc currently does not do cross-module inlining for such
| declarations. That's what I've been told and it's the behaviour I've
| observed, except for the case I noted.
|
| Quite a few packages rely on ghc's behaviour on this, or just rely on
| the fact that in practise things do not get inlined that aggressively.
| If we started looking carefully I think we'd find most hackage packages
| that use FFI get this wrong.
|
| > > It's hard to tell what header files need to be used globally and
| > > inherited by client packages and which can safely be used privately.
| >
| > No, it's easy: they're all potentially inherited.
|
| Which is really annoying :-) I'd like greater control over it, in
| particular a way to limit headers to package scope so that dependent
| code does not need the headers.
|
| Duncan
|
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