I'm with Manuel. Module FFI/Foreign is already stable, and I object to adding things to it arbitrarily. By all means make a new module with these functions, which I can see could be useful. But please don't just allow "feature creep" over already-agreed specifications.

Perhaps those functions which are implemented on top of the Storable primitives should be in another module; I don't really have any preferences. But if we move some of the derived functions out of Storable, they should probably all be moved.

Once these newer features are settled, I look forward to seeing a portable implementation.

Yes, that would be nice. In fact I think most of these features are trivially implemented on top of Storable. As for the errno issues, I think the hsc2hs solution is simple and straightforward and doesn't require an architecture-dependent algebraic datatype. BTW Maloclm, if you haven't yet taken a look at hsc2hs I urge you to do so (fptools/ghc/utils/hsc2hs): it should work unmodified with nhc98, and it'll let you write C constants like EINTR directly in portable Haskell code. Cheers, Simon