Re: [Caml-list] ocaml sefault in bytecode: unanswered questions

[Edgar Friendly <thelema314@gmail.com>]

ivan chollet wrote:
> You basically state that stuff like “let l = !myref in List.iter myfun l”
> (where myfun modifies !myref) wouldn't produce segfault. 
> Why? It would mean that doing "let l = !myref" creates a brand new OCaml
> entity, l, ie a brand new allocation on the heap, and then, messing around
> with !myref inside myfun would be of course 100% safe. Is that what OCaml
> runtime does?

when you have [myref : list ref = ref [1;2]], this is in memory as:

myref -> {contents: _a}
_a -> (1,_b)
_b -> (2,0)

I've given names to the intermediate pointers -- the notation above
shows names as pointers to data structures.  [myref] is a pointer to a
record, whose contents point to the head of the list [1;2].  So there's
already two levels of indirection.

When you do [let l = !myref], [l] gets assigned [_a], so it points to
the head of the list.  List.iter traverses the list not even knowing
that [myref] exists, so if the function [myfun] modifies [myref], it
won't affect List.iter.

Does this make sense?

E