[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: storable-endian

[Henning Thielemann]

On Fri, 24 Dec 2010, Eugene Kirpichov wrote:

> I've released storable-endian 0.2.0, which does not use TH and bases
> on your suggestion (though it has a bit of boilerplate because of
> abandoning TH, but I don't think that's critical).

Great, this should make it also usable on JHC (I have not tested so far).

  However I'm still concerned about the use of so much Unsafe functions. 
You use unsafePeekOff and then wrap it in IO monad, again. Could you also 
stay in IO monad and omit unsafePerformIO?
  You use unsafeCoerce for mapping from (IO Word16) to (IO Int16) - how 
about just (fmap fromIntegral)? Maybe you succeed to find out machine 
endianess at compile time. Then you could use native memory access if the 
user requested endianess is the one of the machine. If you achieve this, 
you could implement peek and poke of Float and Double by just reversing 
the byte order into an 'alloca'd memory area and peek from and poke into 
this one with a native peek or poke, respectively. That is you would not 
need any unsafeCoerce anymore.

Two suggestions on style:
  I find the class names with "Has" prefix not so nice. "Has" the type 
Double a Big Endian or a Little Endian? How about class names 
LittleEndianStorable or LittleEndianOrder? I think I like 
LittleEndianStorable more, since it makes clear, that this is a class 
similar to Storable but specialised to Little Endian byte order.
  I'd like to have GHC specific code in a separate module instead of 
preprocessor instructions, that become quickly confusing if you add 
support for more compilers (say JHC). You may put GHC specific code into 
a private module, say Data.Storable.Endian.Private, and create two 
instances of this module in two directories, say 'generic' and 'ghc'. Then 
in storable-endian.cabal you write:

-- for Data.Storable.Endian
Hs-Source-Dirs: src

-- for Data.Storable.Endian.Private
If impl(ghc)
   Hs-Source-Dirs: ghc
Else
   Hs-Source-Dirs: generic


... and thank you very much for creating this package!