Foreign pointer primitive type
Z-snails opened this issue · comments
This is needed for various features of many functional languages, eg arbitrary precision integers and arrays implemented in FFI.
If there's only support for foreign pointers, that makes code-gen easier as the layout is consistent, however having structs would be useful, eg for interfacing with pass-by-value C libraries.
What operations do you need?
If there's only support for foreign pointers, that makes code-gen easier as the layout is consistent, however having structs would be useful, eg for interfacing with pass-by-value C libraries.
Idiomatic C never passes a struct by value in one of the arguments, only by pointer to avoid copies.
@csabahruska Passing too and from FFI functions. My current use case is arbitrary precision integers in the idris2-grin backend.
@luc-tielen unfortunately not all C libraries are idiomatic.
Would foreign pointers interact with the garbage collector?
In the long term, yes (eg for IORef) however I don't think for Integer all that is needed is a static (as in known at runtime) finaliser function (which can also be grin which calls the ffi free function)