[Haskell-cafe] Passing CString array to Haskell shared library

[Alexander Mumme]

Hello everyone! Long time reader, first time poster.

Was wondering if someone could give me some direction or hints on how I 
might go about passing a CString array into an exported Haskell function.

What I'm trying to do is augment the RecordLinkage package from R using 
Haskell. Seems pretty straight forward. With some help from Neil Mitchell's 
excellent blog post on the subject (
http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2011/10/calling-haskell-from-r.html) I've 
managed to make calls into Haskell and utilize the Text.EditDistance 
package.

This is working rather well, except that I'm trying to calculate the edit 
distance from each of 3000 strings to each of 780,000 strings. Since I'm 
calling Haskell from R once for every comparison (and allocating a result 
record in R for each return) I find myself running out of memory rather 
quickly. What I'd like to do is send both complete string lists into 
Haskell to process, and have it pass me back a result vector.

Below is how I'm currently making the call using individual strings. I've 
tried looking through the GHC User's Guide, through the Wiki on usingthe 
FFI, and a number of other resources, but I seem to have come to an 
impasse. Could anyone lend some assistance?

------------- Code start -----
{-# LANGUAGE ForeignFunctionInterface #-}
module Levenshtein where

    import Foreign.C.Types
    import Foreign.C.String
    import Foreign.Ptr
    import Foreign.Storable

    import Text.EditDistance

    levenshteinWeight :: Ptr Int -> Ptr Int -> Ptr Int -> Ptr CString -> 
Ptr CString -> Ptr Int -> IO ()
    levenshteinWeight del ins subs str1 str2 result = do
        del <- peek del
        ins <- peek ins
        subs <- peek subs   
        str1' <- peekCString =<< peek str1
        str2' <- peekCString =<< peek str2
        poke result $ levenshteinDistance EditCosts { deletionCosts = 
ConstantCost del, insertionCosts = ConstantCost ins, substitutionCosts = 
ConstantCost subs, transpositionCosts = ConstantCost 1} str1' str2'

    foreign export ccall levenshteinWeight :: Ptr Int -> Ptr Int -> Ptr Int 
-> Ptr CString -> Ptr CString -> Ptr Int -> IO ()

------------- Code end   -----

Thanks in Advance!
Alex
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