Ronald Legere <rjljr2@yahoo.com> wrote,
Does anyone know of a tutorial introduction to the FFI? How does one go about getting started with this thing? Any simple examples?
Unfortunately, there is no tutorial style text about the FFI yet - I agree that it is necessary to have one, but nobody sat down and wrote one so far.
I just want to be able to do simple things (mostly access a c library from haskell... ok maybe not trivial :) ) I would be happy if I could just call c programs with simple types and pointers (no way am I going to figure out struct alignment! ).
Have you had a look at the various tools that simplify calling C code? (The do stuff like figuring out struct alignment automatically.) There are four tools by now (in order of increasing complexity and sophistication): (1) hsc2hs: Comes with new versions of GHC. (2) c2hs: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/c2hs/ (3) greencard: http://haskell.org/greencard/ (4) hdirect: http://haskell.org/hdirect/ You see - the Haskell developers believe in choice ;-) Cheers, Manuel