[Haskell-cafe] STM and FFI

[Ryan Ingram]

What are you trying to do?

(1) Call a foreign function from inside an STM transaction?

If the function is pure, this is trivial, just declare it as a pure
function in the foreign import statement.  You do need to be a bit
careful, however, as it is possible the function will get called with
invalid arguments, and I believe that GHC won't interrupt a thread
inside of a foreign function call.  So you need to make sure that the
function never fails to terminate, even when given bad input.
(There's an example code being called with improper arguments in
Simon's STM paper).

If the function isn't pure, you need to do a lot more proofs to assure
that this is safe.  In particular, the function must be able to be
called with invalid input.  If you are confident that this is the
case, you can use unsafeIOToSTM to convert a call to that function
into an STM primitive.

(2) Have a foreign function use transactional memory primitives?

I'm not sure that this is possible.

(3) something else?

  -- ryan

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Mauricio <briqueabraque at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it possible to use foreign function
> interface with STMs? If so, where can I
> find examples?
>
> Thanks,
> Maurício
>
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