[Haskell-cafe] FFI woes!

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 01:13:19PM +0100, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> Another problem!
> When a handle is not being referenced I don't want it to be garbage
> collected if the isPlaying function returns True (in other words I
> want the song to finish playing even if it's not being referenced
> anymore).
>
> The current plan of attack is to have the finalizer fork off a thread
> which does nothing but check the status of the song every 500ms or so
> and when it's finished, releases it. But since I really only need to
> check it every time the garbage collector wants to release it maybe
> there's a better way?
> So I want to annotate the ForeignPtr with a function which can defer
> it's release based on the status of the handle. Is there a way to do
> this?

If you're going to determine when to release the pointer manually (which is
probably best anyways), then there's no need to mess with a ForeignPtr.
Just stick with a Ptr, and spawn your thread to decide when to fall the
free function.  I presume that you really do want to play the song
asynchronously, rather than just returning when the song is over?

> Sadly the C library doesn't seem to provide a callback for when the
> song has finished playing which would be ideal.

Indeed.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net