Rather than "type casts", implicit or explicit, I would like to see something with unambiguous, explicit semantics. Something like LLVM IR's operations, e.g. zero_extend, sign_extend, bitcast, floattoint, pointer_cast, etc.
This may lead to some unnecessarily verbose code in some places but it leaves no surprises. It also gets rid of the need to do dirty tricks like union casts or pointer tricks when you want a bitcast from float to int or vice versa which is common when you write SIMD code, for example, using bitwise ops to extract the sign bit of a float or something like that.
This may lead to some unnecessarily verbose code in some places but it leaves no surprises. It also gets rid of the need to do dirty tricks like union casts or pointer tricks when you want a bitcast from float to int or vice versa which is common when you write SIMD code, for example, using bitwise ops to extract the sign bit of a float or something like that.