Single precision floats

[dselivanov]

It would be useful to add single precision floats to the package. The idea is that we can use R's integer vectors (always 32 bit) to store float32 numbers (same done in https://github.com/wrathematics/float pkg).

I'm not that familiar with codebase for rray, so I'm curious on how much effort do you think it will take? My hypothesis is that it should not take too much - xtensor is templated library, so in theory most of the code for double could be reused.

[DavisVaughan]

I think the limitation might first happen with the xtensor-r bindings. I think xtensor should be able to handle it since it is templated, but xtensor-r checks that the input is one of a few special cased types before creating the xtensor object https://github.com/QuantStack/xtensor-r/blob/master/include/xtensor-r/rcontainer.hpp#L144

[dselivanov]

Well, int32_t should be fine. The issue is how to reinterpret int32_t* as float*. If we could check some attribute of R object in order to understand that it is actually float32..