I see. I surely can't wait for native bigs, but there are definitely more pressing issues to work on first. Tim's proof of principle results look really nice.
I tried DoubleDouble and ran into some errors. I don't think it worked with all standard library math. I'll probably take another look at it in a month. That is definitely the right direction to go for now. On Monday, June 20, 2016 at 7:09:57 PM UTC+1, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > I think it might actually be easier for BigFloat since BigFloats are > fixed-size, whereas BigInts are variable-size. > > Chris, there is a DoubleDouble package > <https://github.com/simonbyrne/DoubleDouble.jl>, which implements > efficient higher-precision floating-point arithmetic, albeit not IEEE > 128-bit floats. As soon as hardware and LLVM support 128-bit IEEE floats, > Julia can easily support them as well – as I'm sure you realize, much more > easily than any other system. > > Nobody wants BigFloats to be inefficient; the current state of the > compiler's ability to reuse them and eliminate allocations simply isn't as > good as it could potentially be. That doesn't mean that this won't be > improved in the future – it will be, although it's hard to say when since > there are a lot of competing priorities and a limited number of people who > can do the kind of compiler work necessary to improve this situation. > Fortunately, the problem is closely related to a number of other > performance issues that we also need to address (strings, array views). >
