[MLton] Re: [MLton-commit] r4677

[Matthew Fluet]

> Fixed profiling, which didn't work on any platform.  There was a
> mismatch between the C prototype for GC_profileWrite, which expected a
> FILE* and the SML imported type, which expected a file descriptor.  I
> went ahead and changed GC_profileWrite to be more like GC_saveWorld
> and take a file name (as a string) and did the fopen and fclose in
> GC_profileWrite.
>
> This problem would have been caught statically if we used something
> like basis-ffi.def + gen-basis-ffi for the runtime imports (like
> GC_profileWrite) besides the basis).  Should we just add stuff in
> basis-ffi.def, should we create another file, or should we leave
> things alone?

In the long run, it might be best to add the GC specific runtime imports 
to an auto-generated file.  There are two reasons that it wasn't done 
originally.  1) I worked on the GC before turning to the C side of the 
basis library; I added basis-ffi.def when faced with the larger amount of 
code needed to be kept in sync.  2) Even after adding basis-ffi.def, I 
felt that some structures, particularly MLton.* structures, would be more 
confusing when spread over two files.  Something like MLton.Thread.* mixes 
a lot of _prim and _import expressions, so it just seemed harder to 
maintain.