The Binding Generator C->Haskell

Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, `chak@cse.unsw.edu.au`

v0.22, 12 December 2005

C->Haskell is an interface generator that simplifies the development of Haskell bindings to C libraries. The tool processes existing C header files that determine data layout and function signatures on the C side in conjunction with Haskell modules that specify Haskell-side type signatures and marshaling details. Hooks embedded in the Haskell code signal access to C structures and functions -- they are expanded by the interfacing tool in dependence on information from the corresponding C header file. Another noteworthy property is the lightweight nature of the approach. More background information is available in a research paper discussing C->Haskell, which is at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/papers.html#c2hs. However, this paper does not cover the more recent advanced features such as function hooks and conditional compilation.

Copyright & Distribution

Copyright (c) [1999..2005] by Manuel M. T. Chakravarty. The manual is distributed under the terms GNU Free Documentation License available from http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/fdl.html.

The master copy of this document is at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/c2hs/; the source is in SGML, which allows you to produce a selection of standard formats, including HTML and Postscript.

Contributions

If you have any comments, suggestions, or contributions, please send them to chak@cse.unsw.edu.au.