5. Change history

• 0.95 --> 0.96:
  • changed the C representation of Haskell_ForeignObj from (long*) to (void*) -- ANSI C guarantees that (void*) is the widest possible data pointer.
  • Updated defnition of varid in Section Naming the external function to reflect Haskell98's.
  • Replaced confusing uses of stdcall with ccall.
• 0.96 --> 0.97:
  • Simplified the calling convention section, support for Pascal (and fastcall) calling conventions dropped.
  • Clarified that the arguments to a safe foreign import must have lifetimes that equal that of a C function application.
  • Outlawed the use of the (GHC specific) types ByteArray and MutableByteArray in safe foreign imports.
  • Added a note that support for the use of unboxed types in foreign import may be withdrawn/deprecated sometime in the future.
  • Simplified section which sketches a possible implementation.
  • Use Hs as prefix for the typedefs for the primitive Haskell FFI types rather than the longer Haskell_.
• 0.97 --> 0.98:
  • Leave out implementation section; of limited interest.
  • Outlined the criteria used to decide on what calling conventions to support.
  • Include newtypes that wrap primitive types in the list of types that can be both passed to and returned from external functions.
• 0.98 --> 0.99:
  • Updated the section on type mapping to integrate some comments from people on <ffi@haskell.org> (a fair chunk of the text in that section was contributed by Sven Panne.)
  • freeHaskellFunctionPtr should belong to module Foreign, not IOExts.