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

[Daniel Peebles]

calloc is just a multiplication followed by malloc followed by memset. Is it
really worth creating a new binding for that? It always seemed like a bit of
a silly API to me to begin with.

On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Jason Dagit <dagitj at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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