[Haskell-cafe] Writing a Storable instance for a C union

Nikita Karetnikov nikita at karetnikov.org
Fri Dec 13 23:24:29 UTC 2013


> You can peek the "key", and then, depending on its value, return a
> different constructor :

> data MyStruct = MyStructOne Foo
>               | MyStructFour Integer
>               | MyStructTwenty [Blah]

OK, but how can I pick one of the union fields?  Also, I’d rather change
MyStruct to Union in the above since I already defined MyStruct, which
has a Storable instance that looks like so (omitting sizeOf, alignment,
and poke):

instance Storable MyStruct where
  peek p = do
    v0 <- peekByteOff p 0
    return $ MyStruct v0

This allows to get the value of key, and I could change it to get one of
the union fields:

instance Storable MyStruct where
  peek p = do
    v0 <- peekByteOff p 0
    v1 <- peekByteOff p 4
    return $ MyStruct v0 v1

But that would require to define a Storable instance for the Union type,
which is exactly the point of the thread.  How can I do so?  (Note that
Foo, Word64, and (Ptr a) are instances of Storable themselves.)

The other question that remains unanswered is how to make such code
portable.  Should I rely on hsc2hs to determine things like sizeOf and
alignment?
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