[PATCH 1/2] add calloc and callocBytes to Foreign.Marshal.Alloc

[Jason Dagit]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 8:59 AM, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 07:20:55AM -0700, Jason Dagit wrote:
> >
> > That wiki page doesn't say how long the discussion period should be or
> give
> > advice on how to determine the size.  What would you recommend for this
> > patch?
>
> I just updated the page to recommend 2 weeks, which I think is the
> status quo.
>
> > So it sounds like the things I missed were:
> >   * putting "Proposal:" in the subject line
> >   * setting a discussion period
> >   * attaching my patch to the trac instance (can I send a pull request on
> > github instead?)
>
> You don't need to make a trac ticket for it until the proposal has been
> accepted.
>

Right, I did understand that.


>
> Anything that means we see that the patch needs to be applied is OK.
> Currently pull requests don't get sent to the mailing list though, and
> there doesn't seem to be an easy way to set that up.
>

Good to know.


>
>
> I also didn't notice a rationale for the change. The type signatures
> looked the same as for the malloc functions, so I don't know what the
> difference is.
>

The difference is that calloc will initialize the allocated memory to zeros.
 Some C libraries assume this, at least freetype2 does, and since I want to
use that library from Haskell I needed a binding to calloc.  I assume others
will run into this need eventually as well.  When I send a "proposal:..."
email, hopefully this weekend, I'll definitely make the rationale clear.

Thanks,
Jason
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