Question

I am writing various types to a byte stream by manually casting and shifting values. I have found this to be more than three times faster than using BitConverter or BinaryWriter.

My problem is with floats. I need to cast them to ints in order to perform shift operations on them, but any cast to int will cause an implicit conversion with truncation, etc. I want the keep the exact binary representation the same. Is this possible?

eg. I want to be able to do similar to:

byte[] bytes = new byte[4];
float myFloat = 32.2;

//following won't compile as can't shift floats.
bytes [0] = (byte)myFloat;
bytes [1] = (byte)(myFloat >> 8);
bytes [2] = (byte)(myFloat >> 16);
bytes [3] = (byte)(myFloat >> 24);

Answer 1

float myFloat = 0.124112f;
float[] floats = new[] { myFloat };
byte[] bytes = new byte[4];
Buffer.BlockCopy(floats, 0, bytes, 0, 4);

?

EDIT: compared to DoubleToInt64Bits its slower though like 4x times on my machine, which makes sense given its array nature and inevitable overhead when compared to extreme simplicity of DoubleToInt64Bits implementation.