On Friday, 9 September 2016 at 11:50:08 UTC, Stefan Koch wrote:
Hi,
In short 80bit real are a real pain to support cross-platform.
emulating them in software is prohibitively slow,
Supposedly, well-optimized 128-bit software floating-point is
actually a bit faster than hardware 80-bit. (Intel keeps 80-bit
around primarily for backwards compatibility, and hasn't put much
effort or die space into improving its hardware speed in many
years.)
and more importantly hard to get right.
64bit floating-point numbers are supported on more
architectures and are much better supported.
They are also trivial to use at ctfe.
I vote for killing the 80bit handling at constant folding.
Destroy!
This has been debated to death in the past. Reducing the maximum
precision is not an acceptable option, but 80-bit could
potentially be replaced by a software 128-bit implementation if
that helps.
