From: Martin Bosslet <Martin.Bosslet@...>
Date: 2012-02-23T20:18:56+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:42833] [ruby-trunk - Feature #6065] Allow Bignum marshalling/unmarshalling from C API


Issue #6065 has been updated by Martin Bosslet.


Akira Tanaka wrote:
> 2012/2/23 Tanaka Akira <akr@fsij.org>:
>  
>  > I think your proposal also rely on machine endianness because
>  > it use "long" type.
>  >
>  > I guess bytes in long type (4 bytes or 8 bytes in usual) is
>  > native endian.  Am I wrong?
>  
>  Oops.  [ruby-core:42813] describes "where each of the longs
>  hemselves should probably be in the same order".
>  
>  I think unsigned long should be used only for native endian.
>  unsigned char should be used instead for big- or little- endian data.
>  -- 

Yes, you're right, when using (unsigned) longs we have to pay
attention to byte order within the long itself or go through
the pain of normalizing them to some pre-defined order. 

That's why I'm all for Yui's proposal now. As long as 
sizeof(char) stays one byte, Yui's solution only requires 
specifying the overall byte order once, if I'm not overlooking
something.

I can work around this currently by using for example hex
representations of the numbers for (un-)marshaling, but having
#bindump and #binload would make things a lot easier and more
efficient.

Would it be OK to add #bindump, #binload and rb_big_uminus
to the public API?

----------------------------------------
Feature #6065: Allow Bignum marshalling/unmarshalling from C API
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6065

Author: Martin Bosslet
Status: Assigned
Priority: Normal
Assignee: Kenta Murata
Category: core
Target version: 2.0.0


Currently, there's no public C API to create a Bignum. 
There is rb_big_pack and rb_big_unpack that will do the
job, but they are not portable.

Could we offer public functionality that is independent 
of the internal representation for the task of 
marshaling/unmarshalling a Bignum to raw C data types?

I'd like to propose something like

- creating a bignum:

  VALUE rb_big_from_ary(unsigned long *longs, size_t num_longs, int signed)

- retrieving a representation of a Bignum (longs are allocated):

  size_t rb_big_to_ary(VALUE big, unsigned long **longs, int *signed)

For getting a representation, rb_big2str could also be used,
but the above would simplify things when developing an extension
that is in need of Bignum support.

Names and signatures are of course open for discussion,
the example should just serve as an indication of what 
I'm aiming at.

To avoid ambiguity, it would have to be defined how 
the longs are ordered and how the signed flag is to be
interpreted - I would suggest a very simple
representation: Let "longs" be the representation of
the absolute value of the bignum in little- or big-endian
order, where each of the longs themselves should probably
be in the same order, in order to eliminate ambivalence.
Signed is either 0 or 1, so no two's complement or anything
involved. 

I would volunteer to provide a patch for this if we would
agree on something.


-- 
http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/