[Haskell-cafe] Library design around FFI library

[Marco Zocca]

I'm implementing the low-level interface to a large C library (using c2hs).

The C functions can be broadly classified by:
*) the main datastructure they operate on, e.g.
     returnType AFunction (A* a, ...);
*) creation, modification, read access, destruction operations for
each of these datastructures, following a common pattern:
     ACreate(), ASet1(), ASet2(), ..,  ARead(), ADestroy(),  BCreate(), etc.

The library rests on top of MPI, so there are e.g. AScatterBegin(),
AScatterEnd() function pairs that account for potentially large delays
associated with computing and moving data around.

On the Haskell side, the C pointer types are represented as e.g.
  data Ah = Ah (Ptr Ah)
  deriving instance Storable Ah

and e.g. a Create function returns the representation of the fresh
pointer along with the usual integer error code:
  ahCreate :: MPIComm -> IO (Ah, Err)


What abstraction may I use to capture logic such as:
*) separate read-only functions from the potentially overwriting ones
*) guarantee precedence relations (e.g. computation can only occur
after initialization)
*) collect or even compose error codes, letting computation go through
iff Err==0 (e.g. a n-ary Maybe ?) Sequencing in the IO monad causes
all effectful functions to run and return their result and/or error
code.

All feedback is welcome;
Thank you in advance