Re: [Chicken-users] "closing" pointers returned by C when they are not needed

[felix]

Alejandro Forero Cuervo wrote:
> How can I let the GC code know that it should call iconv_close(3)
> when the C-pointer (returned by foreign-lambda* in iconv-open) is
> no longer required?

What you can do is use finalizers. The procedure

(set-finalizer! OBJECT PROC)

will call PROC, once the OBJECT (which may for example be a
foreign pointer object) is reclaimed by the garbage collector.

But: using many fimalizers can be somewhat inefficient, the algorithm
for interning new items in the internal finalizer list is not very
clever (and has to improve).

And: finalizers can be tricky to use. If the pointer is reclaimed,
the data it points to may still be used by C code. So be very
careful when using them.


cheers,
felix