I'm not 100% sure if this is a good idea but it's been knocking around in my head all week so I thought I'd share in case it has any merit:
Introduce bitsN types for N=8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and 512. These are similar to uintN but they are unordered and have no arithmetic operations defined. They only have literals, comparison, and bitwise operations. (fmt.Print and friends should render them in hex by default.) Conversions between the numeric types and the bitN are allowed, which, for example, let's us rewrite math.Float64bits as simply func Float64bits(f float64) uint64 { return uint64(bits64(f)) } Since there are no arithmetic operations, the 128+ sizes should be fairly efficient to fake on architectures without special instructions/registers. Potential uses: UUIDs could be stored as a bits128 instead of a [2]uint64 or [16]byte. SIMD vectors could be created and stored easily, even if they need assembly to operate on them efficiently. Same for int128/uint128 values or even for more exotic numeric types like the various float16 definitions or "floating slash" rationals. It would also be handy to have larger bitsets that are easy to work with. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CANG3jX%2B_%3DhjfGEVAaOTToTRHsOVVqTmWQEZz9kzD-uYT0jNosA%40mail.gmail.com.