Re: Marshalling of floats

From: Xavier Leroy (Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr)
Date: Wed Aug 05 1998 - 10:00:18 MET DST


Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 10:00:18 +0200
From: Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>
To: Christopher Oliver <oliver@fritz.traverse.com>, caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: Marshalling of floats
In-Reply-To: <E0z3lz5-00008u-00@fritz.traverse.net>; from Christopher Oliver on Tue, Aug 04, 1998 at 02:38:55PM -0400

> First, floats are simply written in increasing byte order OCAML
> makes no attempt to rearrange based on endianness.

Floats are written in "native" endianness (the natural endianness of
the machine writing the file), but along with a flag telling which
endianness is used. input_value, then, swaps bytes if it runs on a
processor whose endianness does not match that used to create the
file. This is more efficient than converting to and from a fixed
endianness in the frequent case where the data is read back on the
same machine that wrote it.

> Should OCAML swap byte orders on some hardware to try to compen-
> sate, or should we make no attempt to record floating point
> portably between the major architectures? The change in byterun/
> intern.c and byterun/extern.c to handle byte swapping is fairly
> trivial provided we include the config.h

input_value/output_value is already portable across all platforms that
use IEEE floats. The byte-swapping code is already in byterun/intern.c.

> Harder, does anyone have any good ideas besides conversion to
> and from lists for marshalling floating arrays between bytecode
> and native OCAML programs? Without this sort of thing, one must
> walk structures by hand if there are variant types with floating
> arrays.

The next release of OCaml will use the same format for float arrays in
native-code and in bytecode, thus solving this problem.

Regards,

- Xavier Leroy



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