Re: [Caml-list] Save callbacks from OCaml to C

[Jeremie Dimino <jdimino@janestreet.com>]

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On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Christoph Höger <
christoph.hoeger@tu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Thanks for your reply,
>
> Am 03.02.2016 um 12:48 schrieb Jeremie Dimino:
> > void g(...) {
> >   CAMLparam0();
> >   CAMLlocal3(ml_t, ml_x, ml_g);
> >   ...
> >   CAMLreturn0;
> > }
>
> I tried this before, but it seemed like the GC would still write into
> the arguments here. Is the semantics of CAMLparam0 that I might have
> additional, unmanaged arguments?


CAMLparam0 is for when you have no [value] arguments but have some local
[value] variables. CAMLlocalN must be preceded by a CAMLparamY, that's why
you need the CAMLparam0.


> ​Note that &(user_data->g) must be a GC root as well. Are you
> > registering &(user_data->g) with the GC in any way?
>
> Good question. It _is_ an argument to a function on the other side of
> the stack, so in principle it is alive, but could the GC move it?


​Yes, it should be alive. However I imagine that in the main C stub, you
have something like this:

value blah(value g, ...)
{
  ...
  user_data->g = g;
  ...
}

So if the GC ends up moving [g], it needs to know that it must update
[user_data->g] to point to the new location.

There are several solutions:

- if [user_data] only exists for the duration of the [blah] function call,
I would suggest to change [user_data->g] to be a [value*] instead:

value blah(value g, ...)
{
​  CAMLparam1(g);​
​  ...
  user_data->g = &g;
  ...
}

- if it lives for longer, you need to register [user_data->g] as a global
variable, as described in the manual (Rule 4 of
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/intfc.html).

-- 
Jeremie

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