Question

Newbie question. I’m going through the very nice Ocaml ORA book. When I went to play with the magic_copy example from the section on Marshal, I was closer to a browser than a terminal, so I tried it out in ocsigen’s toplevel in a browser, where I was surprised to get the result:

     (* js_of_ocaml *)
# let ora_magic_copy a =
  let s = Marshal.to_string a [Marshal.Closures] in
  Marshal.from_string s 0;;

val ora_magic_copy : 'a -> 'b = <fun>
# (ora_magic_copy 2 : float) +. 3.1;;

- : float = 5.1

Checking if something has changed between ocaml 2 (current version when the book was written) and ocaml 3.12.1, used by the toplevel installed on my machine and by js_of_ocaml, I tried the same example in the normal toplevel installed on my machine and got the result explained in the book: a segfault due to the typesystem’s trouble with checking Marshaled values.

    (* Linux toplevel *)
# (ora_magic_copy 3: float) +. 2.1;;
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I’m just curious: why?

I see that in three cases, Marshal.to_string gives the same string: linux marshalling an int, js_of_ocaml marshalling and int, js_of_ocaml marshalling a float. The odd-man-out is linux toplevel marshalling a float.

Is this due to something about js_of_ocaml using javascript’s base types? Or just… undefined behavior?

Answer 1

Yes, your problem comes from the fact that you are testing on a javascript toplevel.

When you use the standard ocaml toplevel, the +. operation operates on OCaml floats, i.e. a double boxed inside a block, the two parameters of +. are expected to be pointers to such boxes. In your example, instead of a pointer, you give the OCaml integer 2 (internally, it is represented as 5, i.e. 2 << 1 + 1), so OCaml segfaults while trying to read the double that should be at position 0x5 in memory…

In the js_of_ocaml browser, floats are just javascript floats, and integers are javascript integers, and +. is the javascript addition, which is able to add integers and floats (by automatically converting integers to floats), because values are tagged by their types.