[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: system-filepath 0.4.5 and system-fileio 0.3.4

[John Meacham]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:
> That sounds right. It basically means you don't have to write the C
> stubs yourself, which is nice because (a) doing so is a pain, and (b)
> when the foreign import is inside 2 or 3 CPP conditionals it's even more
> of a pain to replicate them correctly in the C stub.
>
> Unfortunately, there are cases where C doesn't get all the type
> information it needs, e.g.:
>    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2979#comment:14
> but I'm not sure what the best fix is.

I believe jhc's algorithm works in this case. Certain type constructors have C
types associated with them, in particular, many newtypes have c types that are
different than their contents. So my routine that finds out whether an argument
is suitable for FFIing returns both a c type, and the underlying raw type (Int#
etc..) that the type maps to. So the algorithm checks if the current type
constructor has an associated C type, if it doesn't then it expands the newtype
one layer and trys again, however if it does have a c type, it still recurses
to get at the underlying raw type, but then replaces the c type with whatever
was attached to the newtype. In the case of 'Ptr a' it recursively runs the
algorithm on the argument to 'Ptr', then takes that c type and appends
a '*' to it.
If the argument to 'Ptr' is not an FFIable type, then it just returns
HsPtr as the C type.

Since CSigSet has "sigset_t" associated with it, 'Ptr CSigSet' ends up turning
into 'sigset_t *' in the generated code. (Ptr (Ptr CChar)) turns into char**
and so forth.

An interesting quirk of this scheme is that it faithfully translates the
perhaps unfortunate idiom of

newtype Foo_t = Foo_t (Ptr Foo_t)

into  foo_t************ (an infinite chain of pointers)

which is actually what the user specified. :) I added a check for recursive
newtypes that chops the recursion to catch this as people seem to utilize it.

>> I ask because jhc needs such a feature (very hacky method used now,
>> the rts knows some problematic functions and includes hacky wrappers
>> and #defines.) and I'll make it behave just like the ghc one when possible.
>
> Great!

It has now been implemented, shall be in jhc 0.8.1.

    John