Alastair Reid writes:

...

I thought we established that generating valid C prototypes from the Haskell FFI type signature wasn't possible due to the incompleteness of the Haskell type (lack of 'const' modifiers for one thing - is there anything else?).

Compilers use the same calling sequence whether you tell them about const or not.

I believe that we can call all C functions correctly knowing only the calling convention (ccall, stdcall, etc) and the Haskell type. I certainly hope this is true since Hugs' implementation of wrappers depends on it.

(Hmmm, some calling conventions do funny things when passing and returning small structs. I don't know much about this though...)

I think some ABI's specify a different calling convention for varargs functions than non-varargs functions. (I remember reading this on some Haskell mailing list some time back, one of the previous times this same discussion occurred.) Carl Witty