Sven: > In a nutshell: I'm not very happy with the explicit allocation and > deallocation of the 'foreign import wrapper' thunks. They are an > artefact of the Haskell implementations and look strange in an > otherwise GC-ed world...
I think they're explicitly deallocated (and, hence, explicitly allocated) because C uses explicit allocation/deallocation. The expectation is that the function pointer will be handed to C and that C code will be responsible for deallocating the function. I'm at something of a loss for how GC support would help with your example. How would Haskell's GC know that the one and only call to the wrapper had just been made? Incidentally, I'd like to add a Haskell version of freeHaskellFunPtr to the C interface: extern void hs_free_haskell_funptr( HsFunPtr x ); Of course, it can always be foreign exported (and compilers might even implement it that way) but I think we'll find that every major library exports its own copy and, since there's only so many obvious variants on the Haskell name, we'll quickly run into name conflicts which will then be resolved in the usual ugly way. I recognize that this is the top of a slippery slope which will quickly plunge us into a situation of exporting a whole bunch of functions for manipulating ffi-related datatypes. I'm not sure that's such a bad thing though. -- Alastair _______________________________________________ FFI mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ffi
