Announcing the first version of the reinterpret-cast package: Hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/reinterpret-cast Github: https://github.com/nh2/reinterpret-cast Takes the bit representation of a number and uses it for a different numeric type. This is reinterpret_cast from C++ and float f = 1.23; int i = * (int *) &f; from C. I started writing this because the PointCloudLibrary project (PCL) makes RGB colours available as an int-packed format cast to a float value - that's silly but oh the legacy. I was surprised that fast reinterpret casts are not readily available in base or at least GHC, but there are improvements going on (see links in the README). Meanwhile this package is for dealing with it. The way implemented here is the fastest possible way known to me as of now. In particular, it is faster than what data-binary-ieee754 does at the moment. Contributions are very welcome.