Interest in supporting in place bitwise operations?

[mbarbin]

Hello, and thanks for bitv.

I'm wondering whether supporting in place bitwise operations would be a good fit for this library.

To give an example with and, I'm thinking something like creating a new alterative to add to the currently supported functional operator:

val bw_and : t -> t -> t

and add support for a new function:

val bw_inplace_and : mutates:t -> t -> unit

Similarly to the existing bw_and, this inplace operation would only be valid for operands of the same lengths.

I would think this pattern would apply to the other bitwise operations in the library (or, xor, not).

Please let me know if interest by a contribution along these lines. Thank you!

[mbarbin]

Ah, I failed to write the latest version I was thinking of, this was in fact:

val bw_and_in_place : result:t -> t -> t -> unit

which I think is more flexible. This would be accompanied by a comment saying that result may be given one of the input operands as a valid and supported use case, such as in:

Bitv.bw_and_in_place ~result:a a b

to store the result of the operation into a a <- a /\ b.

Raises Invalid_argument if result, a and b are not all of the same length.

[backtracking]

Hello @mbarbin ,
That's a nice suggestion indeed.
If you make a PR, I'll be happy to review it.

[mbarbin]

Hi @backtracking thanks a lot! I published a draft going the direction of the second proposal in #36 if you want to have a quick look to see if the approach makes sense to you. Please don't hesitate to give me feedback so I can finalize it if you like it. Thank you!

[mbarbin]

Closed by #36

[mbarbin]

Hello @backtracking I hope all is well with you. I wanted to signal an interest for a release of bitv in opam to include the new in-place operators - I would be interested in publishing a https://github.com/mbarbin/vcs that would make use of it. Thanks a lot!

[backtracking]

Hi @mbarbin ,
I'll make my best to make a new release of bitv next week.

[mbarbin]

Hi! Thanks a lot for your response, and please feel no precise timeline pressure from me as long as its on the radar I'm happy. Talk soon!

[backtracking]

On its way: ocaml/opam-repository#28385

[mbarbin]

Wonderful. thanks!

[backtracking]

@mbarbin Now merged and available in opam FYI.

[mbarbin]

@backtracking thank you! This PR switched vcs' bit vector to using bitv. I also cut a vcs release to include this change and submitted to opam. Thanks again!