Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
Who can suggest a way to cast from Float to Word32 and Double to Word64 using ghc? The actual task is that I need to write out the Float as a little endian sequence of four bytes and also be able to read it back in. The writing and reading are done in Put and Get monads to ByteString (from the "binary" package).
I think alloca-like hacks is really the wrong direction and asking for trouble. You are trying to translate between platform-dependent native floats, and IEEE floats in a specified platform-independent binary format for Google. So use encodeFloat/decodeFloat - fast primitives in GHC - on the native side, and a hand-written Binary instance for the exact format you need on the Google side. My opinion, YMMV. Regards, Yitz