Idiomatic OCaml: int8 int16 int32 int64 uint8 uint16 uint32 uint64

Learning
1

I can define my own types:

module Int8 = struct type t = int end;
module Int16 = struct type t = int end;
...

But I’m wondering if there is a standard / idiomatic set of definitions.

The XY problem: I’m using this not for computation, but for serialization, where I want the type to specify how many bytes we are writing to, and this needs to be consistent across multiple different programming languages.

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2

I think these days the canonical solution is ocaml-stdint.

3

That may have been fixed now, but I rather remember that one as being quite buggy. I would rather go with GitHub - yallop/ocaml-integers: Various signed and unsigned integer types for OCaml

4

Also, I suspect that stdint doesn’t support js_of_ocaml

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5

Adding support for jsoo should not be difficult, if anyone is interested …

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6

Unfortunately it does not seem to implement i8 and i16 – see: Where are signed 8-bit and 16-bit numbers?.

7

Seems like int_repr supports bit widths up to 128bits, but that requires you to depend on base?

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8

I wrote a PR to add support for small signed integers but it hasn’t gotten any comments/review yet. I’ve pinned the branch in my private projects without issue though, so maybe that would be of interest.

Here’s the PR: feat: add small signed integers by zbaylin · Pull Request #49 · yallop/ocaml-integers · GitHub

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9

Ah cool, I saw that PR, and was considering depending on that branch in my projects, if that’s ok!

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Is there any differences in performance among the integer libraries mentioned on this thread? I’ve used stdint but im wondering if there is a more performant alternative.

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11

There were some reviews added in July. I’ve tried to address them in this PR: Add small signed integers by brendanzab · Pull Request #51 · yallop/ocaml-integers · GitHub. It would also be good to add support for js_of_ocaml too (without the need for a separate stub package).