On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 03:22:57PM -0400, Peter Tanski wrote:
I suppose that one alternative is to let the library use 'malloc', but make a foreign-pointer proxy for every bignum, which calls 'free' when the GHC garbage collector frees it. Not as efficient, though.
Esa and I had discussed the possibility of copying the value returned from the Bignum lib into the GHC system, which certainly would not be very memory efficient, but might be faster. Among other memory modifications, it might be a good idea to initialise the Bignum lib with the RTS and modify the lib with a memory cache or garbage collection system of its own.
I don't understand why this would be useful. Just use the standard FFI ForeignPtr mechanism and it takes care of garbage collection for you and doesn't have any issues with concurrency. This would also make the library fully portable to any haskell implementation with FFI support. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈