Chris Kuklewicz wrote:

For the allocation functions in Foreign.Marshall.Alloc, are the function contracts that return new pointers such that the pointers are never nullPtr, or is it prudent to always check the new ptr?

Yes, the result of mallocBytes (for example) is never NULL. If the allocation fails, an exception is raised.

I can see on GHC than allocaBytes uses newPinnedByteArray# but I have not tracked down the source file for that to read it.

newPinnedByteArray# is a GHC primitive. It is implemented in C--, so you won't find it in a Haskell source file anywhere. Cheers, Simon