tomasz.zielonka:
On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 02:16:22PM +1100, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
We believe so, and its a bug if this is not the case.
The src documents the encoding format used for each type (we were unable to attach haddocks to instances.. grr.)
All data is encoded in Network order, and extended to 64 bits for word sized values (like Int). It should be possible to encode a structure with ghc on x86, and decode it on a sparc64 running hugs.
Did you consider using an encoding which uses variable number of bytes? If yes, I would be interested to know your reason for not choosing such an encoding. Efficiency?
Yes, efficiency. If you look in tests/ there's a pretty heavy duty benchmark we use to compare against C. Sticking to word sized writes where possible is a big one (up to 10 fold). Interestingly, I did write an aligned-only, host-endian layer, and it was only some 10% faster on x86 over network order code. -- Don