Comment by tialaramex
1 day ago
> This is a huge mistake. You would never expect something like bitCast to do this.
Is there at least some sort of @transmute or something ? If Zig wants to say "bitCast" means this odd operation, but provides the thing most people actually want under some plausible name that's just an extra thing to learn which seems OK.
@intCast
So, since I don't write Zig I had to go look this up, to save anyone else the bother this is what Rust would call an 'as' cast or C programmers might think of as a value cast, it's going to try to make a value which has a similar meaning but of another type, which may be arbitrarily expensive. What people often want here is a transmute, Rust's core::mem::transmute which changes nothing about the bits except what those bits mean, since the bits didn't change and the machine only has bits anyway this is "free".
There's `@ptrCast` as mentioned in the post, but I agree that it's not optimal. I would really like a `@transmute` builtin.
Alternatively I suppose `extern` unions do that, but again, not quite the same syntactically.
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