Re: [Caml-list] create a closure in external C function?

[qrczak@knm.org.pl (Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk)]

Tue, 06 Mar 2001 14:56:51 -0800, Chris Hecker <checker@d6.com> pisze:

> On the C side, we'll use the ffcall trampoline/vacall interface
> to pass qsort the pointer to a function that calls back the caml
> function with the right parms.

I've just seen ffcall. callback is approximately what I wanted.

trampoline+vacall is evil. It uses a global variable; this is not
thread safe.

callback seems to be better, but still more kludgy than I expected.
I'm not sure if it's the right choice for OCaml; it should not be
*that* ugly. Especially if you statically know types of arguments,
which is the case I am talking about. Unfortunately it's very
processor-dependent.

I would like to have this functionality in OCaml's foreign function
interface, without forcing to rely on an inconvenient third-party
package.

I'm not sure how it should look like, because OCaml has a different
approach to FFI than Haskell: the OCaml<->C glue is in C, where for
Haskell<->C the glue is in Haskell. So Haskell defines a mapping
from Haskell function types involving primitive types to C types,
and a special kind of declaration which defines converters from
Haskell functions to C function pointers of particular types. The
OCaml's approach would need to call the conversion from the C level,
in which case the compiler has no chance of generating stubs tailored
for a particular type but must offer a generic C interface with its
own way to describe C types.

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
 \__/
  ^^                      SYGNATURA ZASTĘPCZA
QRCZAK

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