[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: cinvoke 0.1 released

[Remi Turk]

I am happy to finally announce cinvoke 0.1, a binding to the
C library cinvoke[1], allowing functions to be loaded and called
whose names and types are not known before run-time.

Why?

Sometimes you can't use the Haskell foreign function interface
because you parse the type of the function from somewhere else,
i.e. you're writing an interpreter for a language that has an FFI
itself.

What?

The main function it exports is:

  cinvoke :: Symbol -> RetType b -> [Arg] -> IO b

And because code is worth a thousand words, here's a small program
that uses libc to write a 1Gb buffer of random garbage to a file:

> module Main where
>  
> import Foreign.CInvoke
> 
> main = do
>     cxt <- newContext
>     libc <- loadLibrary cxt "libc.so.6"
>     malloc <- loadSymbol libc "malloc"
>     creat  <- loadSymbol libc "creat"
>     write  <- loadSymbol libc "write"
>     free   <- loadSymbol libc "free"
>     let sz = 2^30
>     buf <- cinvoke malloc (retPtr retVoid)
>                                     [argCSize sz]
>     fd  <- cinvoke creat  retCInt   [argString "/tmp/test", argCUInt 0o644]
>     n   <- cinvoke write  retCSize  [argCInt fd, argPtr buf, argCSize sz]
>     cinvoke free (retPtr retVoid) [argPtr buf]

It hopefully works on any machine on which cinvoke works,
but has only been tested on linux x86_64.
As the current version of cinvoke only installs a static library,
it does not work from GHCi at the moment (without hacking cinvoke
to build a shared library).
More interesting examples are included in examples/ in the
package.

Where?
Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cinvoke

Cheers, Remi

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/cinvoke/