Re: [Caml-list] How to read different ints from a Bigarray?

[Olivier Andrieu <oandrieu@nerim.net>]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 14:54, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working on binding s for linux libaio library (asynchron IO) with
> a sharp eye on efficiency. That means no copying must be done on the
> data, which in turn means I can not use string as buffer type.

hmm I think you could try with strings.
You need to allocate the storage yourself (with malloc) but then, as
long as you properly set up the header and last field of the block as
OCaml does for its native strings, the runtime will use it without
problems. The GC will see that the block is outside the Caml heap and
won't try to manage it.
And on the Caml side you can use it as a regular string.
The only caveat I know is that this disrupts the polymorphic
comparison function a bit.

That's worth a try IMO.



Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain@le-gall.net> wrote:
> > PS: Is a.{i} <- x a C call?
> Yes.

really ? Given the number of Pbigarray* constructors in the compiler
code, I'd be surprised :)
No I think that for some cases like "accessing a 64bits bigarray on a
32bits arch" result in a C call, but otherwise it's handled by the
compiler.

-- 
  Olivier