This is a way to look at the pointer living inside a foreign object. This function takes a function which is applied to that pointer. The resulting IO action is then executed. The foreign object is kept alive at least during the whole action, even if it is not used directly inside. Note that it is not safe to return the pointer from the action and use it after the action completes. All uses of the pointer should be inside the withForeignPtr bracket. The reason for this unsafeness is the same as for unsafeForeignPtrToPtr below: the finalizer may run earlier than expected, because the compiler can only track usage of the ForeignPtr object, not a Ptr object made from it.

This function is normally used for marshalling data to or from the object pointed to by the ForeignPtr, using the operations from the Storable class.

This function extracts the pointer component of a foreign pointer. This is a potentially dangerous operations, as if the argument to unsafeForeignPtrToPtr is the last usage occurrence of the given foreign pointer, then its finalizer(s) will be run, which potentially invalidates the plain pointer just obtained. Hence, touchForeignPtr must be used wherever it has to be guaranteed that the pointer lives on - i.e., has another usage occurrence.

To avoid subtle coding errors, hand written marshalling code should preferably use Foreign.ForeignPtr.withForeignPtr rather than combinations of unsafeForeignPtrToPtr and touchForeignPtr. However, the later routines are occasionally preferred in tool generated marshalling code.

This function ensures that the foreign object in question is alive at the given place in the sequence of IO actions. In particular Foreign.ForeignPtr.withForeignPtr does a touchForeignPtr after it executes the user action.

Note that this function should not be used to express dependencies between finalizers on ForeignPtrs. For example, if the finalizer for a ForeignPtr F1 calls touchForeignPtr on a second ForeignPtr F2, then the only guarantee is that the finalizer for F2 is never started before the finalizer for F1. They might be started together if for example both F1 and F2 are otherwise unreachable, and in that case the scheduler might end up running the finalizer for F2 first.

In general, it is not recommended to use finalizers on separate objects with ordering constraints between them. To express the ordering robustly requires explicit synchronisation using MVars between the finalizers, but even then the runtime sometimes runs multiple finalizers sequentially in a single thread (for performance reasons), so synchronisation between finalizers could result in artificial deadlock. Another alternative is to use explicit reference counting.

Allocate some memory and return a ForeignPtr to it. The memory will be released automatically when the ForeignPtr is discarded.

mallocForeignPtr is equivalent to

    do { p <- malloc; newForeignPtr finalizerFree p }

although it may be implemented differently internally: you may not assume that the memory returned by mallocForeignPtr has been allocated with Foreign.Marshal.Alloc.malloc.

GHC notes: mallocForeignPtr has a heavily optimised implementation in GHC. It uses pinned memory in the garbage collected heap, so the ForeignPtr does not require a finalizer to free the memory. Use of mallocForeignPtr and associated functions is strongly recommended in preference to newForeignPtr with a finalizer.