Dear GHC team, In the current implementation there is no way to force finalization of the foreign ptr if there are still references to it. In this scenario the finalization will be executed during the next garbage collection. In some cases it is known that the foreign pointer value is not used anymore but the references still exist in the stack and they cannot be freed from the collector. In such cases I want to be able to explicitly finalize the foreign pointers. For that reason I wrote the following simple function: module FinalizeForeignPtr(finalizeForeignPtr) where import GHC.ForeignPtr import Data.IORef finalizeForeignPtr :: ForeignPtr a -> IO () finalizeForeignPtr foreignPtr = do finalizers <- readIORef refFinalizers sequence_ finalizers writeIORef refFinalizers [] where refFinalizers = case foreignPtr of (ForeignPtr _ ref) -> ref (MallocPtr _ ref) -> ref The function uses the internal representation of the foreign pointer. Is there any other way to do this or I am missing something? If there is not any other way, then I think that the right place for this function is in the standard libraries. Any suggestions will be welcomed! Krasimir __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/