[ocaml-ctypes] Defines, and Structs with platform-specific fields

[Trevor Smith]

Daniel,

Your suggestion makes sense. If I were to do that -- any suggestions of how
to deal with freeing that memory? Ideally, without adding a lifecycle
"free" call to the user library. My thoughts would be to store the cstruct
reference (malloced by C) in a ref in OCaml, then attach a finalizer to the
OCaml ref that would call the corresponding C free. I suggest the ref
because my understanding is that his would be guaranteed to be finalized
once (as opposed to a normal value which might get copied multiple times).
Thoughts on this?

Aside: I wonder if ctypes could be extended to deal with this cross
platform issue fully in ctypes-land? Have others thought about this?

Also: are the maintainers open to documentation contributions? I noticed
that a lot of these questions on the FAQ are currently unanswered. I would
be happy to throw a couple commits with documentation suggestions for the
problems that I am running into.

Trevor

On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 5:34 AM, Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli at erratique.ch>
wrote:

>
>
> Le vendredi, 17 octobre 2014 à 19:53, Trevor Smith a écrit :
>
> > Thank you for your reply Daniel.
> >
> > About the structs: perhaps I have a fundamental misconception about how
> ctypes works. Libuv functions expect that the caller allocate the memory
> for the struct. My understanding was that adding fields to the struct in
> ctypes would affect the memory that struct takes up.
> That's correct if you allocate it with ctypes, but you don't need to. Just
> make a C function that allocates the struct and bind to that function.
>
> Daniel
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ocaml.org/pipermail/ctypes/attachments/20141018/a279e835/attachment.html>