(In)Equality type specialization

(In)Equality type specialization

[Christophe TROESTLER]

Hi,

Is a declaration like

external float_eq : float -> float -> bool = "%equal"

considered to be an acceptable way to specialize equality?  Type
annotations do not work in my case because it may be that one passes
[float_eq] as a function argument before evaluating it.  I could of
course define

let float_eq (x:float) y = x = y

but it is slightly less efficient.

So my question is whether I can expect the external declaration to be
robust enough to keep working in future versions of OCaml or whether I
should prefer the second (safe) solution which OCaml compilers will
eventually optimize.

Regards,
C.