Help: writing ffi bindings to a C library

[Bayley, Alistair]

So...

I'm still trying to write this Oracle OCI ffi binding. Can anyone tell me
how to declare the Haskell type for this function:

sword   OCIEnvCreate (OCIEnv **envp, ub4 mode, dvoid *ctxp,
                 dvoid *(*malocfp)(dvoid *ctxp, size_t size),
                 dvoid *(*ralocfp)(dvoid *ctxp, dvoid *memptr, size_t
newsize),
                 void   (*mfreefp)(dvoid *ctxp, dvoid *memptr),
                 size_t xtramem_sz, dvoid **usrmempp);

Note that when I use it, I'm passing 0 (NULL) into almost all of the args,
so the usage in C is typically:

	rc = OCIEnvCreate(&envhp, OCI_DEFAULT, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);

i.e. I don't care about most of the args, so that should make the Haskell
declaration simpler. Some of the arguments are pointers to functions, for
example.

What I can't figure out is how to declare the type of the first arg. Is is
Ptr (Ptr OCIEnv) ?

Here's what I have so far (not much, I know):

> module Main where
> import Foreign
> import Foreign.C.Types
> import Foreign.C.String
> import Foreign.Ptr

> data OCIEnv

> foreign import ccall "oci.h OCIEnvCreate" ociEnvCreate :: Ptr OCIEnv ->
Int -> Int -> Int -> Int -> Int -> Int -> Int -> Int



-----Original Message-----
From: Ronald Legere [mailto:rjljr2@yahoo.com]
Sent: 21 May 2003 20:32
To: 'haskell-cafe@haskell.org'
Subject: Re: Help: writing ffi bindings to a C library


Agreeing with David, but I like to use 
 types rather than (). YOu can do this because,
in ghc, you can write:
data Blah
with no rhs, and it is understood to be an 'opaque'
type.  Ghc beleives any claims you make about
passing Ptr Blah back and forth to C  in your foreign
import declarations <* Grin *>.

As for passing structures back and forth, and
accessing the components, you can do it from Haskell
or from the "c-side"... I can send you a sample of
doing it from haskell if you wish.

Ron


--- David Roundy <droundy@abridgegame.org> wrote:
> On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 04:27:10PM +0100, Bayley,
> Alistair wrote:

> > construct a Ptr a? What type should "a" be?).
> 
> Unless you actually need to ever access their
> contents, I'd just define the
> pointers to be of type Ptr (), essentially like a
> void * pointer in C.  No
> need to use Storable if they are only ever accessed
> through C functions
> (which I would hope would be the case).
> --


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