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Simon Marlow authored
Had a brainwave on the way to work this morning, and realised that the garbage collector can handle "pinned objects" as long as they don't contain any pointers. This is absolutely ideal for doing temporary allocation in the FFI, because what we really want to do is allocate a pinned ByteArray and let the GC clean it up later. So this set of changes adds the required framework. There are two new primops: newPinnedByteArray# :: Int# -> State# s -> (# State# s, MutByteArr# s #) byteArrayContents# :: ByteArr# -> Addr# obviously byteArrayContents# is highly unsafe. Allocating a pinned ByteArr# isn't the default, because a pinned ByteArr# will hold an entire block (currently 4k) live until it is garbage collected (that doesn't mean each pinned ByteArr# requires 4k of storage, just that if a block contains a single live pinned ByteArray, the whole block must be retained).
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