Re: expose strlen from Foreign.C.String

I’m on board with this import, but we’ll need to get the type right if we’re going to bind to libc’s strlen directly

foreign import unsafe "strlen"
  cstringLength :: CString -> IO CSize

> On Jan 22, 2021, at 6:04 PM, chessai <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I agree with Andrew, let's just export the lifted ffi call
> 
> This suits my needs, but, regardless of my needs, seems like a perfectly sensible addition to Foreign.C.String
> 
> Concrete addition:
> 
> foreign import unsafe "strlen"
>   cstringLength :: CString -> IO Int
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 17:09 Viktor Dukhovni <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 04:56:33PM -0500, Andrew Martin wrote:
> 
> > This will eventually be used to great effect in bytestring. See
> > https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/191 <https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/191>.
> 
> Yes, you might recall that I'm well aware of that (already merged) PR,
> indeed that's how I happened to recall that cstringLength# is present
> in 9.0.
> 
> > To get back to the original question, I think that any user-facing
> > cstringLength function should probably be:
> > 
> >     cstringLength :: CString -> IO Int
> > 
> > We need a separate FFI call that returns its result in IO to
> > accomplish this. But this just be done in base rather than ghc-prim.
> > There are no interesting rewrite rules that exist for such a function.
> 
> So I guess your suggestion in response to @chessai's original post:
> 
> >> On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 09:54:30AM -0800, chessai wrote:
> >> 
> >> I've wanted the following before:
> >> 
> >> foreign import ccall unsafe "strlen"
> >>   cstringLength# :: Addr# -> Int#
> >> 
> >> cstringLength :: CString -> Int
> >> cstringLength (Ptr s) = I# (cstringLength# s)
> >> 
> >> A natural place for this seems to be Foreign.C.String.
> 
> would be to instead directly implement the lifted FFI variant:
> 
>     foreign import ccall unsafe "strlen"
>       cstringLength :: CString -> IO Int
> 
> which probably would not need a wrapper and can be exported directly.
> 
>     module Main (main) where
>     import Control.Monad ( (>=>) )
>     import Foreign.C.String (CString, withCString)
> 
>     foreign import ccall unsafe "strlen"
>       cstringLength :: CString -> IO Int
> 
>     main :: IO ()
>     main = withCString "Hello, World!" $ cstringLength >=> print
> 
> The cost of this safety net is that it results in more sequencing than
> is strictly necessary.  It is enough for the enclosing IO action to not
> embed the length in its result in some not yet fully evaluated thunk.
> 
> I guess @chessai can let us know whether the more strictly sequenced
> variant meets his needs.
> 
> -- 
>     Viktor.
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