[Haskell-cafe] allocation for "pure" FFI functions

[Nicolas Pouillard]

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 09:07:22 +0100, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-10-14 at 17:45 +0000, Johannes Waldmann wrote:
> > Hi. I wonder how to do the following properly.
> > 
> > I have one (large) C  type, let's call it T,
> > and I want to sell it as an abstract type in Haskell.
> > 
> > I want to use C functions as if they were of type T -> T  
> > (pure function, returns a modified copy of the input)
> > and the question is, how to do the memory allocation for that,
> > in particular, how to avoid  IO  showing up 
> > in the (visible) types on the Haskell side:
> > 
> > I don't want IO because I don't want to declare some artificial
> > order of execution - instead I want lazy evaluation.
> > E.g., I might have some Haskell record with a T component
> > which may or may not be evaluated (accessed) at all.
> 
> It is exactly for this purpose that the Haskell FFI library includes
> unsafePerformIO. This is basically *the* legitimate use case for it, so
> you don't need to feel bad about it.

I still feel bad about it. Its so easy to turn unsafePerformIO into
unsafeCoerce, that I can well happen by mistake. I would like to have
an unsafePerformIO that is only unsafe w.r.t. performing effects, not
breaking the type-system. Here is a suggestion, it may be not new but
I never seen it on unsafePerformIO:

unsafePerformIO :: Typeable a => IO a -> a
unsafePerformIO = ... same code ...

Provided that Typeable instance are all generated by the compiler this
has the desired effect of preventing generalization of mutable data.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard
http://nicolaspouillard.fr