[mercury-users] C FFI for discriminated union types.

[Julien Fischer]

Hi,

On Sun, 19 Jun 2011, Guillaume Yziquel wrote:

> I am now concerned with the C foreign function interface, most notably
> concerning discriminated union types. I currently have the following
> type declaration:
>
> 	:- type term_def --->
> 		term_def(term)		;
> 		term_def_string(str)	.
>
> And I am passing back values of this type to C code, and would ideally
> like to map them to an OCaml algebraic datatype. So I'd like to do the
> conversion in my C stub code.
>
> However, everything seems to be an MR_Word, and there isn't much
> structural type information for such discriminated datatypes available
> on the C side. 
> So how should I deconstruct them? The reference guide is fairly
> explicit for C# and such, but not for C...

The data representation used for (non-enum) discriminated union types in
the C grades is lower level that used in the non-C grades and is not
very amenable to being manipulated in handwritten C code.  I suggest
you consider doing at least some of the conversion in Mercury code.

Julien.
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