Hi, Am Montag, den 06.10.2014, 09:58 +0000 schrieb p.k.f.holzenspies@utwente.nl:
- The implementation is based on FastInts, which, on most machines nowadays, is a 64-bit thing. The serialisation in BinIface is explicitly based on Word32s. Aside from the obvious potential (albeit with a low probability) for errors, this lead me to wonder about 32/64-bitness. Is there a reason for 64-bit versions of GHC to write Word32s, or is this a historic thing? Must the interface-files be bit-compatible between different versions (32/64-bits) of the compiler? Lastly, is the choice of whether "this" is a 32 or 64-bit version completely determined by WORD_SIZE_IN_BITS (MachDeps.h)?
A while ago we had problems with haddock in Debian when the serialization became bit-dependent.¹ I suggest to keep the specification of any on-disk format independent of architecture specifics. Greetings, Joachim ¹ http://bugs.debian.org/586723#15 -- Joachim “nomeata” Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ Jabber: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org