[Haskell-cafe] FFI basics

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 01:02:57PM -0800, Evan Laforge wrote:
> Question #1 is compiling FFI using modules.  I'd like to use ghc
> --make for the speed and convenience, but obviously it doesn't know
> how to compile the C.  So my hybrid approach has been to write a
> makefile for the C, and then make the haskell program depend on the .o
> files and invoke ghc --make on them, like so:
> 
> _dummy_target: cfile.o
>  ghc -Ic_includes -Lc_libs --make -main-is HsMain -o target HsMain.hs
> cfile.o -lclib
> 
> Unfortunately, ghc doesn't seem relink the target if cfile.o changed,
> so as a hack I put 'rm target' before the ghc line to make it link
> every time.
> 
> Does anyone have a better solution?

Yeah.  GHC knows how to call GCC on .c files, so just do:
  ghc -Ic_includes -Lc_libs --make -main-is HsMain -o target HsMain.hs cfile.c -lclib

Don't worry about recompilation checking, GCC is two orders of magnitude
faster than GHC so the extra time will be neglible unless your program
is 95% C.

> #2 is structs.  What's a good way to marshal structs?  The
> straightforward way would be C stubs like "T get_t(struct foo *x)" for
> every field of the struct, but clearly at any kind of scale something
> like greencard will be necessary (as an aside, greencard's last update
> seems to have been "support this newfangled FFI"... is it still alive
> and just "done" or are people using something else nowadays?).
> Hopefully in can be made efficient though (I don't know if cross
> C-haskell inlining will happen, but maybe with -fvia-c?).  The other
> issue is that the haskell type will not be Storable, so the
> Foreign.Array stuff won't work... I need a separate sizeof C stub and
> allocaBytes.
> 
> It's much easier to declare e.g. "type SomeCStruct = Word64" and then
> use Bits to pick out the fields in pure haskell, but I imagine this
> assumes way too much about how the struct is layed out in memory.

I don't know about GreenCard, but hsc2hs is still very much alive and
also addresses that goal.