Sorry to ask this again, but I didn't understand the answer last time, and the need to explicitly free StablePtr's, Haskell FunPtr's and close foreign handles, etc, is surely a serious wart in the FFI spec.
In Sept 2001 Ashley Yakeley asked why ForeignPtr couldn't be generalized, i.e. an interface like (slightly modified from the original): data Proxy a -- abstract; for GHC, = Proxy ForeignObj# instance Eq (Proxy a) type Finalizer a = FunPtr (a -> IO ()) -- or IO () for Haskell finalizers newProxy :: Finalizable a => a -> Finalizer a -> IO (Proxy a) addFinalizer :: Finalizable a => Proxy a -> Finalizer a -> IO () withProxy :: Finalizable a => Proxy a -> (a -> IO b) -> IO b touchProxy :: Finalizable a => Proxy a -> IO () class Finalizable a -- things that are boxes around primitive data _______________________________________________ FFI mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ffi
