[MLton] Callback functions: how?
Vesa Karvonen
vesa.karvonen at cs.helsinki.fi
Thu Feb 15 05:31:39 PST 2007
Quoting Vesa Karvonen <vesa.karvonen at cs.helsinki.fi>:
> Quoting "Wesley W. Terpstra" <wesley at terpstra.ca>:
> > Vesa Karvonen wrote:
> > > Basically, there is a single exported ML callback function and a
> > > callback cache for each imported C function that takes callbacks.
> > > The key generated by the cache is given to the C side as the
> > > context pointer (uarg in your snippet).
> > This sounds pretty much the same as my solution, except that my hash
> > function is (fn x => x) and I don't need a collision policy.
>
> Yes. I also considered the same free list scheme that you are using.
> It has one deficiency with respect to scaling. Namely, if the array
> becomes large at some point (lots of callbacks registered), it may not
> be possible to shrink it (after most of those callbacks are
> unregistered). The free list scheme is fine if there is a (small)
> upper bound on the number of active simultaneous callbacks for each
> imported C function. Otherwise it may consume arbitrary amounts of
> memory without doing useful work.
I devised a caching scheme that should be faster than a hash table and
does not suffer from the problem described above. The idea is simple:
* Allocate mutable C objects that hold an integer index into an array.
The malloc cost can be amortized and shouldn't be huge problem.
* When removing a cached element, move the last cached element to the
position of the removed element. This makes it possible to shrink the
array.
You can find the implementation (has a couple of rough edges ATM) source
code from mltonlib:
http://mlton.org/cgi-bin/viewsvn.cgi/mltonlib/trunk/com/ssh/misc-util/unstable/int-obj.sig?view=auto
http://mlton.org/cgi-bin/viewsvn.cgi/mltonlib/trunk/com/ssh/misc-util/unstable/cache.sig?view=auto
http://mlton.org/cgi-bin/viewsvn.cgi/mltonlib/trunk/com/ssh/misc-util/unstable/mk-int-obj-cache.fun?view=auto
http://mlton.org/cgi-bin/viewsvn.cgi/mltonlib/trunk/com/ssh/misc-util/unstable/ptr-cache.sml?view=auto
http://mlton.org/cgi-bin/viewsvn.cgi/mltonlib/trunk/com/ssh/misc-util/unstable/ptr-cache-test.sml?view=auto
-Vesa Karvonen
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