On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 8:27 PM, wren ng thornton <w...@freegeek.org> wrote: > Thomas DuBuisson wrote: >>> >>> And note that we wouldn't need unsafePerformIO for the FFI if all >>> programs were made in Haskell ;). >> >> Perhaps that's true, though entirely unrealistic, in the application >> world. In the OS world you need access to machine registers and >> special instructions (CR3 anyone? CP15?) which isn't built into any >> language save assembly - for these FFI will always come in handy. >> >> Also, Haskell continues to have an unfortunate lack of primitives >> suitable for casting types (ex: zero copy form a bytestring like >> entity to Word32s). In this realm FFI can outperform cleaner looking >> code that must rely on individual byte reads. > > The FFI doesn't always require unsafePerformIO,
True. I mis-read the previous e-mail as "we wouldn't need unsafePerformIO OR (vs for) the FFI " so please ignore that response to a non-existent statement! _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe