On Nov 27, 2011, at 12:55 AM, Charles Srstka wrote:

> On Nov 26, 2011, at 5:44 PM, Koen van der Drift wrote:
> 
> Another thing that might be a good idea for general safety reasons is to have 
> f be a Float32 instead of a regular float type.

This will only work if we can safely assume the sender is using 4 byte floats. 
This cannot be guaranteed, since the size of floats is platform dependend. So, 
*if possible* I would recommend to send these floats as decimal strings and 
then convert these number strings to whatever math type appropriate on the 
receiver site. There is no base64 encoding/decoding required, too.

Since the posted code is obviously not designed to be efficient, the extra cost 
for string to double/float conversions can probably be accepted or can even be 
compensated by a more efficient math type on the receiver site when performing 
computations.


> Although I don’t know how likely it is, it’s probably theoretically possible 
> that the float data type could eventually become something other than 32 bits 
> on some platform, and if that happened, doing a memcpy of sizeof(float) bytes 
> from a uint32_t would cause garbage data to be written to the float.
Yes, this.


Andreas

> 
> Charles
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