On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 at 21:47:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 09:20:23PM +0000, Nick B via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
I do want to clarify, though, that I think at this point
implementing unum in the D compiler is almost certainly
premature. What I had in mind was more of a unum library that
early adopters can use to get a feel for how things would work.
If the unum system turns out to have garner enough support
that it starts getting hardware support, then it should be
relatively easy to transition it into a built-in type. I don't
see this happening for at least another 5-10, though. It took
at least as long (probably longer) for hardware manufacturers
to adopt the IEEE standard, and right now unums aren't even
standardized yet.
T
just a quick update re Unum 2.0
I hope to be able to present a link to the finalised paper on
Unums within 24 to 48 hours.
Also here, below, is an quick update, on the software development
on Unums from Prof Gustafson.
"Work is progressing on a reference C implementation on two
fronts, and I am presently trying to unite the two. One is the
coding by Isaac Yonemoto, which is being funded by my Singapore
employer (A*STAR)... which is like having a team of about eight
programmers, right there. He's an ultra-fast programmer and a
crack mathematician as well, so he finds amazing shortcuts and
insights that I don't notice. Isaac tends to code in Julia first,
and C second. When he does C, he almost does assembler; he
carefully studies what x86 instructions are available and
squeezes every cycle.
The other is a small team at UC Santa Cruz with one applied math
grad student doing most of the coding and a couple of faculty
advisors (plus me dialing in now and then), and just about has
plus-minus-times-divide working, the last I heard. This is part
of an Open Source initiative, so you can bet that this will be
documented and released into the wild the way open source
software should be. That one is going for C directly.
There may be other efforts. Some MIT folks also created a Julia
version of type 2 unums, and it may be almost as fast as C. There
may be others."
