On Fri, 24 Dec 2010, Eugene Kirpichov wrote:
I don't think I'd like to allocate memory in these functions - I expect them to have very predictable and very high performance.
I'm afraid on ix86 it is not possible to move a Double that is stored in (two 32 bit) general purpose registers over to the FPU or to an XMM register. That is, what happens if you read a bit pattern from memory while reversing the order and then converting to double is actually on machine level that it is written back to memory and then loaded into FPU or SSE unit. I'm not entirely sure, you better check the assembly code that your Haskell code generates.
I'm using unsafeCoerce because it allows me to treat all these types in the same fashion (which is good for correctness and readability), and unsafeCoerce's semantics is identical to what is expected of this code - interpret a memory area as a value of a different type.
That's also the purpose of castPtr. It is certainly also unsafe, but not as unsafe, since you only convert between "dead bit patterns" and not between "life Haskell values". :-)