Iavor Diatchki wrote:
I am aware of the unsafe methods to cast arrays. My question was if there was a function in the libraries to dump an immutable array of bytes to a handle, that is safe (it could, of course, be implemented behind the scene using unsafe primitives, however, this is implementation specific). My impression was that there isn't one, and I guess you are confirming this. I think it would be useful to have such a function in the libraries.
It's true that there isn't a way to write an arbitrary UArray to a Handle as a sequence of bytes, but there is also no requirement that a UArray is even implemented as a sequence of bytes either; indeed the Hugs implementation doesn't represent a UArray using unboxed elements. If we were to add a way to serialise a UArray to a Handle, we'd also have to specify the exact serialised representation (or leave it undefined). Cheers, Simon