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RC 7 of the FFI Addendum is now available from

In adding mallocForeignPtr and friends to Hugs, I found that I needed the address of free to pass as a parameter.

There's no suitable way to generate &free from MarshalAlloc.free (the obvious use of a Haskell wrapper would break the whole reason for the recent change to ForeignPtrs).

Could we add &free to the export list of MarshalAlloc?

foreign import ccall unsafe "stdlib.h &free" ptr_free :: FunPtr (Ptr a -> IO ())

I am currently using 'ptr_free' as the Haskell name for this pointer but I expect that a better name could be found with little effort.

So far, we never explicitly say (I believe) that `malloc' corresponds to C's `malloc()'; ie, that C's `free()' (and hence, `ptr_free') may actually be used to free storage that has been allocated by `malloc'.

We might define the CAF

cfree :: FunPtr (Ptr a -> IO ())

as a pointer to a C function that free's storage allocated with `malloc' from C without entering Haskell land and explicitly note that this is useful as a finalizer.

The construction still seems pretty awkward to me. I hope the change to ForeignPtr doesn't entail any more nasty suprises like this.

... maybe I'm being stupid, but I don't see what the problem is. Why can't mallocForeignPtr be implemented as: mallocForeignPtrBytes size = do r <- c_malloc (fromIntegral size) newForeignPtr r ptr_c_free foreign import ccall unsafe "malloc" c_malloc :: CInt -> Ptr a foreign import ccall unsafe "&free" ptr_c_free :: ForeignPtr (Ptr a -> IO ()) i.e. it's completely independent of MarshalAlloc.malloc. If you happen to know that MarshalAlloc.malloc is the same as C's malloc, then you could use that instead, but you don't have to. A separate issue is whether MarshalAlloc.malloc *should* be specified as being an interface to C's malloc(). I hadn't noticed that it currently wasn't. I don't think I have any code that relies on it, and I can't think of any strong arguments one way or the other, apart from the fact that MarshalAlloc is not part of the C-specific marshalling library. Cheers, Simon