[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: binary: high performance, pure binary serialisation

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 07:11:55PM -0800, John Meacham wrote:
> Is the binary format portable? I need the produced files to work on both
> 32 and 64 bit architectures and with big and little endian machines. And
> of course, between different versions of a compiler or different
> compilers.

Sorry to reply to myself, looking at the code, I see that it is.
however, Ints appear to be stored as 64 bits always, this seems like a
mistake. The Haskell standard only specifies Ints must have at least 30
bits of precision so programs that rely on more than that are not
portable anyway. Plus, it is unlikely that any compilers ever will have
Ints > 32 bits, ghc does at the moment by accident of design and it is
considered a misfeature that will be fixed at some point. It would be an
ugly wart to be stuck with going forward...

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈