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newbie question: foreign pointers in f#
f#

I need a facility in F# that is comparable to foreign pointers in Haskell. My foreign pointers should be C pointers. It must also be possible to invoke a native C function on such a pointer whenever the pointer is garbage collected by the F# runtime. That function would then perform the required cleanup on the native side.

Any pointers? (pun intended :-)

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Any pointers? (pun intended :-)

Eventually, you should be able to see this section of the F# Language Spec, but that's presently TBD.

You could wrap your C code in a COM object, and use it as described here in Robert Pickering's Foundations of F#. Scrolling up a few pages describes how to use P/Invoke, too.

Robert has a more detailed explanation of the F# Foreign Function Interface (FFI) on his strangelights.com wiki, but that may be dated (IIRC, there are now some library functions to help manage pinning).

Don Syme has an excellent chapter on this topic in Expert F#, some of which can be read here, but Google has omitted a number of pages.

Hope that's enough to get you started!

By on 5/6/2009 7:39 AM ()

Thanks a lot. It seems, though, as if the link underlying the pointer to Robert Pickering's work is the same as the link underlying the pointer to the language spec. Would it be possible for you to post the real link?

By on 5/6/2009 9:06 AM ()

Thanks a lot. It seems, though, as if the link underlying the pointer to Robert Pickering's work is the same as the link underlying the pointer to the language spec. Would it be possible for you to post the real link?

Cut-and-paste error.

Try this link. Also updated in earlier post.

By on 5/6/2009 10:17 AM ()

thanks for the correction

/Michael B

By on 5/7/2009 7:46 AM ()

Is this what you're looking for:

[link:www.strangelights.com]

By on 5/6/2009 7:22 AM ()

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