Safe Haskell | None |
---|---|
Language | Haskell98 |
- module Foreign
- module Foreign.C
- unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a
- type MbString = Maybe String
- marshall_bool_ :: Bool -> IO Int
- unmarshall_bool_ :: Int -> IO Bool
- marshall_string_ :: [Char] -> IO CString
- unmarshall_string_ :: CString -> IO String
- marshall_stringLen_ :: [Char] -> IO CStringLen
- unmarshall_stringLen_ :: CString -> Int -> IO String
- data Float :: *
- data Double :: *
- data Char :: *
Documentation
module Foreign
module Foreign.C
unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a
This is the "back door" into the IO
monad, allowing
IO
computation to be performed at any time. For
this to be safe, the IO
computation should be
free of side effects and independent of its environment.
If the I/O computation wrapped in unsafePerformIO
performs side
effects, then the relative order in which those side effects take
place (relative to the main I/O trunk, or other calls to
unsafePerformIO
) is indeterminate. Furthermore, when using
unsafePerformIO
to cause side-effects, you should take the following
precautions to ensure the side effects are performed as many times as
you expect them to be. Note that these precautions are necessary for
GHC, but may not be sufficient, and other compilers may require
different precautions:
- Use
{-# NOINLINE foo #-}
as a pragma on any functionfoo
that callsunsafePerformIO
. If the call is inlined, the I/O may be performed more than once. - Use the compiler flag
-fno-cse
to prevent common sub-expression elimination being performed on the module, which might combine two side effects that were meant to be separate. A good example is using multiple global variables (liketest
in the example below). - Make sure that the either you switch off let-floating (
-fno-full-laziness
), or that the call tounsafePerformIO
cannot float outside a lambda. For example, if you say:f x = unsafePerformIO (newIORef [])
you may get only one reference cell shared between all calls tof
. Better would bef x = unsafePerformIO (newIORef [x])
because now it can't float outside the lambda.
It is less well known that
unsafePerformIO
is not type safe. For example:
test :: IORef [a] test = unsafePerformIO $ newIORef [] main = do writeIORef test [42] bang <- readIORef test print (bang :: [Char])
This program will core dump. This problem with polymorphic references
is well known in the ML community, and does not arise with normal
monadic use of references. There is no easy way to make it impossible
once you use unsafePerformIO
. Indeed, it is
possible to write coerce :: a -> b
with the
help of unsafePerformIO
. So be careful!
marshall_bool_ :: Bool -> IO Int Source
unmarshall_bool_ :: Int -> IO Bool Source
marshall_string_ :: [Char] -> IO CString Source
unmarshall_string_ :: CString -> IO String Source
marshall_stringLen_ :: [Char] -> IO CStringLen Source
data Float :: *
Single-precision floating point numbers. It is desirable that this type be at least equal in range and precision to the IEEE single-precision type.
data Double :: *
Double-precision floating point numbers. It is desirable that this type be at least equal in range and precision to the IEEE double-precision type.
data Char :: *
The character type Char
is an enumeration whose values represent
Unicode (or equivalently ISO/IEC 10646) characters (see
http://www.unicode.org/ for details). This set extends the ISO 8859-1
(Latin-1) character set (the first 256 characters), which is itself an extension
of the ASCII character set (the first 128 characters). A character literal in
Haskell has type Char
.
To convert a Char
to or from the corresponding Int
value defined
by Unicode, use toEnum
and fromEnum
from the
Enum
class respectively (or equivalently ord
and chr
).