This is related to supporting quads on 32 bit Perl. I believe that in all perls, the highest numeric data unit is a 8 byte double. I have a C library that takes and returns 128 bit SSE2 data. The library looks at the 128 bit value as a union of various things, sometimes its an array of 4 floats, an array of 16 chars, an array of 2 doubles, array of 2 64 bit integers or 1 128bit integer or 1 128 bit floating point, depending on a bitfield passed to the function or depending on the function's name. All the values are little endian. I use perl on windows. What should my XS wrapper around this C library expose these 16 byte SSE2 variables as? There seems to be alot negativity over Math::BigInt's bloatedness. Also how to do you load packed little endian numbers into Math::BigInt, it seems bigint only knows what big endian ASCII hex is for importing numbers. The solution should be CPAN grade. The SSE2 variables are very rarely used by this C library but they need to be exposed somehow for the rare case someone wants to call that function. The easiest thing is just have the user supply a 16 byte string and they get a 16 byte string in return. They have to pack and unpack the union array themselves. Is this the best solution? I think the most difficult solution to make but easiest to use is a tied hash that takes and returns BigInts. I couldn't find anything on CPAN that already does SSE or SSE2.

edit: I have SSE2 not SSE data

edit: Instead of a 16 byte string (primative), or a tied hash (complicated), I thought of the following, 
#load it as 4 floats, a little bit of precision is lost
$obj = Local::SSE->new_fp(1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0);
#load it as 2 doubles
$obj = Local::SSE->new_fp(1.0, 2.0);
#load it as 4 32 bit ints
$obj = Local::SSE->new_int(1, 2, 3, 4);
#load it as 2 64 bit ints, quad support perl required
$obj = Local::SSE->new_int(1, 2);
#load it raw
$obj = Local::SSE->new_raw("\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x
+00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x01");
#read as 4 shorts
@array = $obj->get_fp(4);
#read as 2 doubles
@array = $obj->get_fp(2);
#read as 4 32 bit ints
@array = $obj->get_int(4);
#read raw packed value
$packedSSEVal = $obj->get_raw();

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Is this a better choice for an api?

In reply to supporting SSE 128 bit data in Perl by bulk88

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