mmap() and strings

[Julien Cristau <julien.cristau@ens-lyon.fr>]

Hello list,

I'm wondering if somebody has an idea for the following problem:

I'm working on a program which manipulates a buffer. A writer process 
regularly changes this buffer, and reader processes have to work on it 
after each change. Currently, the buffer is a string and is passed to 
the readers trough pipes. However, this is costly because the buffer is 
copied many times at each iteration.
We thought we could use mmap(2), but there seems to be no easy solution 
to mmap() a memory region and treat it as a string in ocaml. Does 
anybody have a better idea how we could solve this problem without 
copying the buffer?

Julien