question about coercions between primitive types in STG level

[Ömer Sinan Ağacan]

Hi all,

In my compiler pass(D1559, see ElimUbxSums.hs) I'm doing some unsafe coercions
at the STG level. It works fine for lifted types, but for unlifted ones I'm
having some problems. What I'm trying to do is given a number of primitive
types I'm finding the one with biggest size, and then generating a constructor
that takes this biggest primitive type as argument.

The problem is that this is not working very well - GHC is generating illegal
instructions that try to load a F32 value to a register allocated for I64,
using movss instruction.

CoreLint is catching this error and printing this:

    Cmm lint error:
      in basic block c1hF
        in assignment:
          _g16W::I64 = 4.5 :: W32;   // CmmAssign
          Reg ty: I64
          Rhs ty: F32

So I have two questions about this:

1. Is there a way to safely do this? What are my options here? What I'm trying
   to do is to use a single data constructor field for different primitive
   types.  The field is guaranteed to be as big as necessary.

2. In the Cmm code shown above, the type annotation is showing `W32` but in the
   error message it says `F32`. I'm confused about this, is this error message
   given because the sizes don't match? (64bits vs 32bits) Why the type
   annotation says W32 while the value has type F32?

Thanks..