06:01 <vaninwagen> ein_ you are right. Sorry about the confusion. The primitive is only used on pony side to associate a certain type with the pointer. It is only used as a type argument.

06:01 <vaninwagen> You can work with pointers that way if the struct is allocated/created in C land.

06:02 <vaninwagen> So with the color constructors from your lib that works fine

06:02 <vaninwagen> Such a struct will never be garbage collected though

06:07 <vaninwagen> For such a struct to be properly freed, you either need to do it manually at some point or use a wrapper class and use its finalizer `fun _final()` to free that pointer when the class is garbage collected.

06:28 <vaninwagen> The type argument has no influence on the memory being occupied by the pointer btw

06:28 <vaninwagen> In this particular case

10:52 <einStrauch> @vaninwagen i've read the response after i've left, and that's about what i expected tbh

10:53 <einStrauch> one thing i'm still wondering about, tho, is that the color-struct is not necessarily a pointer per sé

10:53 <einStrauch> and stack-allocated

10:53 <einStrauch> would it not just be discarded on function exit anyway then, like e.G. integer types etc.?

10:57 <einStrauch> incidentally, the rason i'm resisting wrapping it all in a class is that one of the associated functions requests an array of the type

10:58 <einStrauch> having to allocate 2 such arrays, and copy the primitive array into the wrapped one seems incredibly wasteful

17:30 <vaninwagen> einStrauch in the case of pointers to stack allocated structs you need to take great care with your pointers and not leak them somewhere out of their scope. Maybe you are better off using pony structs instead of pointers?

17:31 <vaninwagen> Copying wrapper classes sounds indeed stupid

17:32 <vaninwagen> But i have to admit i am by far no ffi expert, maxbe someone else with more experience here wanna step in