[Haskell-cafe] accessing a ByteArray from FFI

[Mihaly Barasz]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 15:02 +0200, Johan Tibell wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Mihaly Barasz <klao at nilcons.com> wrote:
> 
> > Well, I don't know enough about how GC is specified in GHC, but _in
> >  practice_ calls to GC could happen only on entry to the exampleFn
> > closure.  Not between the address computation and the foreign call. (I
> > simply looked at the generated code, I don't know if there is any
> > guarantee for that.)
> >
> 
> There can be additional heap checks at the start of any basic block in the
> generated assembly for the function. Right, in practice there's probably
> not an issue.
> 
> 
> > Thanks, I'll look into that. Are there any pointers/examples?
> >
> 
> There's some code out there on the web that uses the extension. Here's an
> example:
> https://github.com/tibbe/hashable/blob/master/Data/Hashable/Class.hs#L470

Thanks, this works wonderfully. The code is much simplified:

{-# LANGUAGE ForeignFunctionInterface #-}
{-# LANGUAGE MagicHash, UnliftedFFITypes #-}

module FFIExample (exampleFn) where

import Control.Monad.ST (runST)
import Data.Primitive.ByteArray (ByteArray(..), ByteArray#, unsafeFreezeByteArray)
import qualified Data.Vector.Primitive as P
import qualified Data.Vector.Primitive.Mutable as PM
import Data.Word (Word64)

foreign import ccall unsafe "my_external_fn" myExternalFn :: ByteArray# -> Int -> Int -> Int

exampleFn :: P.Vector Word64 -> Int
exampleFn v = runST $ do
  PM.MVector off len mba <- P.unsafeThaw v
  ByteArray ba <- unsafeFreezeByteArray mba
  return $! myExternalFn ba off len


And yeah, now the unsafeThaw followed immediately by the
unsafeFreezeByteArray looks even sillier. (But again, it completely
disappears in the generated code.)

Mihaly


> 
> > I don't know why, but the constructor for Vector is not exported, only
> > for the MVector. But, this use of unsafeThaw is completely benign.
> > (Actually, it fully disappears in the generated code. :))
> >
> 
> Probably because it's a ByteArray#, not an Array#. For the latter unsafe
> thawing results in the object being put on the GC mutable list (in practice
> that means that the info table ptr changes).