[Haskell-cafe] How to best deal with nullPtr from alloca and friends?

[Edward Z. Yang]

Excerpts from Jason Dagit's message of Tue Mar 29 00:43:10 -0400 2011:
> I was reading up on the documentation for alloca and friends[1], which says,
> "If any of the allocation functions fails, a value of
> nullPtr<http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.2/html/libraries/base-4.3.1.0/Foreign-Ptr.html#v:nullPtr>
> is
> produced."
> 
> It seems like every example of FFI code that I find which uses alloca
> ignores the possibility of a nullPtr[2, 3, 4].
> 
> So then I started trying out examples with the help of dmwit and others from
> #haskell.
> 
> It seems that actually, alloca and friends throw exceptions:
> dmwit> main = allocaArray (2^30) (\ptr -> print ((nullPtr :: Ptr Double) ==
> ptr))
> <dmwit> lispy: alloca also throws an exception.
> <dmwit> lispy: Or rather, allocaBytes throws an exception, and alloca is
> implemented in terms of allocaBytes, so I'm *guessing* that alloca throws an
> exception.
> 
> I'm on a 64bit version of windows here with more than 4GB of memory to spare
> for the GHC process. Unfortunately, allocaBytes takes an Int so I can't test
> it with a request larger than the amount of physical ram I have.

You could try testing by setting different limits on the memory usage of your
process with ulimit. I'll give a test, but the prevailing wisdom is that if you
OOM, you're really out of luck.

Edward