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Foreign

Portability | portable
Stability | provisional
Maintainer | ffi@haskell.org

Description
A collection of data types, classes, and functions for interfacing with another programming language.
Synopsis

module Data.Bits
module Data.Int
module Data.Word
module Foreign.Ptr
module Foreign.ForeignPtr
module Foreign.StablePtr
module Foreign.Storable
module Foreign.Marshal
unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a

Documentation
module Data.Bits
module Data.Int
module Data.Word
module Foreign.Ptr
module Foreign.ForeignPtr
module Foreign.StablePtr
module Foreign.Storable
module Foreign.Marshal
unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a

This is the "back door" into the `IO` monad, allowing `IO` computation to be performed at any time. For this to be safe, the `IO` computation should be free of side effects and independent of its environment.

If the I/O computation wrapped in `unsafePerformIO` performs side effects, then the relative order in which those side effects take place (relative to the main I/O trunk, or other calls to `unsafePerformIO`) is indeterminate. You have to be careful when writing and compiling modules that use `unsafePerformIO`:

- Use `{-# NOINLINE foo #-}` as a pragma on any function `foo` that calls `unsafePerformIO`. If the call is inlined, the I/O may be performed more than once.
- Use the compiler flag `-fno-cse` to prevent common sub-expression elimination being performed on the module, which might combine two side effects that were meant to be separate. A good example is using multiple global variables (like `test` in the example below).
- Make sure that the either you switch off let-floating, or that the call to `unsafePerformIO` cannot float outside a lambda. For example, if you say: `f x = unsafePerformIO (newIORef [])` you may get only one reference cell shared between all calls to `f`. Better would be `f x = unsafePerformIO (newIORef [x])` because now it can't float outside the lambda.

It is less well known that `unsafePerformIO` is not type safe. For example:

         test :: IORef [a]
         test = unsafePerformIO $ newIORef []

         main = do
         	      writeIORef test [42]
         	      bang \<- readIORef test
         	      print (bang :: [Char])

This program will core dump. This problem with polymorphic references is well known in the ML community, and does not arise with normal monadic use of references. There is no easy way to make it impossible once you use `unsafePerformIO`. Indeed, it is possible to write `coerce :: a -> b` with the help of `unsafePerformIO`. So be careful!

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