Re: Effect of large binaries on garbage collection

On Wednesday 12 March 2003 00:49, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:

"Simon Peyton-Jones" wrote,

...

| In the current CVS GHC, undoubtedly the right thing to use is | Foreign.mallocForeignPtr. Internally these are implemented as | MutableByteArray#, so you get fast allocation and GC, but from the | programmer's point of view it's a normal ForeignPtr.

I wonder how it is for a random FFI user to discover this. Does some advice belong in the FFI spec, or in GHC's FFI chapter?

What is needed is a FFI tutorial (in addition to the spec); similar to how we have the Gentle Introduction to complement the Report.

Thank's for the advice from everybody. Actually, on the whole I think the FFI spec is pretty easy to understand, but tutorial would be nice too :-) There are obviously subtleties about it which I had not understood properly. Regards -- Adrian Hey