bulat.ziganshin:
Hello Don,
Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 11:01:31 PM, you wrote:
if uavector use ghc's built-in unboxed array operations (as Data.Array.Unboxed does) then it's necessarily bounded to types supported by those operations
And what is Storable limited to?
Ultimately they're all limited to the primops for reading and writing,
the full story:
ghc up to 6.6 has slow access to ForeignArrays, as you may recall
therefore, those primitives was added. ByteArra# plus those primitives was the only way to have unboxed arrays with fast access
starting with 6.6, ForeignArray access is no-op, so we can just use obvious Ptr operations (via Storable class) to get unboxed arrays fast access. so, no more need for those special ByteArray# access operations
but Array library still old, so any effort based on its spources, got the same restrictions
also, ByteArray# may be unpinned, but afaik, this isn't really important - it can be coerced to Ptr for the period of one operation
Right, so my point stands: there's no difference now. If you can write a Storable instance, you can write a UA et al instance. And GHC 6.6 was released what, 11 October 2006? So this has been the case for a long time. -- Don