Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> writes: > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 7:24 PM Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> wrote: >> Doesn't that rely on a specific implementation of double precision (IEEE)? >> I thought that we don't want to limit ourselves to platforms with IEEE floats.
> Just by the way, you might want to read the second last paragraph of > the commit message for 02ddd499. The dream is over, we're never going > to run on Vax.
Still, the proposed hack is doubling down on IEEE dependency in a way that I quite dislike, in that (a) it doesn't just read float values but generates new ones (and assumes that the hardware/libc will react in a predictable way to them), (b) in a part of the code that has no damn business having close dependencies on float format, and (c) for a gain far smaller than what we got from the Ryu code.
We have had prior discussions about whether 02ddd499 justifies adding more IEEE dependencies elsewhere. I don't think it does. IEEE 754 is not the last word that will ever be said on floating-point arithmetic, any more than x86_64 is the last CPU architecture that anyone will ever care about. We should keep our dependencies on it well circumscribed.