[Haskell-cafe] carry "state" around ....

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 01:05:48PM +1200, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> I think it may be time for a little clarity about aoicb's.
> From the Single Unix Specification:
>  "The <aio.h> header shall define the aiocb structure
>   which shall include AT LEAST the following members:
>     int             aio_fildes     File descriptor.
>     off_t           aio_offset     File offset.
>     volatile void  *aio_buf        Location of buffer.
>     size_t          aio_nbytes     Length of transfer.
>     int             aio_reqprio    Request priority offset.    struct  
> sigevent aio_sigevent   Signal number and value.
>     int             aio_lio_opcode Operation to be performed.
>  "
> The "AT LEAST" here means that
>  - a portable program may rely on these members being present
>  - a portable program MUST assume that an unknown number of
>    additional members are also present
>  - a portable program may freely copy such a record, but may
>    only pass it to a library function if that function is
>    expecting to initialise it
>
> For asynchronous I/O, this means that
>  - you can allocate an aiocb object
>  - an aiocb passed to aio_suspend, aio_error,
>    aio_return, or aio_cancel should have been
>    filled in by aio_read or aio_write and should
>    be EXACTLY THE SAME object, not a copy of it.

Yes. This is pretty standard as far as what you can count on in terms of
standard C structures. The method I use in the RSA.hsc module I posted
is compatible with these assumptions. Generally this is pretty much
exactly the thing hsc2hs was made to solve. 

Just a note, if you are doing manual explicit frees of the aiocb
structure then you only need a 'Ptr', if you want the structure to be
automatically garbage collected when all haskell references to it
disappear, then you need to use 'ForeignPtr'.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈