I remember having some nasty bugs interfacing with OpenGL before I
realized 'float' was 64bits; I'd like to add this may be a source of
confusion for programmers coming from C and C++. I find myself always
explicitly naming the size of the type (i32, u8, f32, etc), so I wonder
how much 'int' is needed, given your argument to remove 'float'. Should
we only have fixed-width types, or still leave some ambiguity?
J
On 2013-07-01 06:32, Corey Richardson wrote:
This is a copy of https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/7525, here
for broader discussion.
I propose to remove the float type from the language.
float is defined by the manual as "the largest floating-point type
that is directly supported by hardware on the target machine," but
this isn't actually true (x87 supports 80-bit floats). I've seen it
advertised as the "fastest float for the target," but performance also
needs to include cache and bus pressure as well, not just speed of
manipulation, and often the "fasted" in terms of manipulation is going
to be some SIMD type using a coprocessor, and the situation gets even
trickier if/when we have Rust being used for GPGPU kernels (LLVM has
an R600 (AMD GPU) backend) or accelerator chips (a la Epiphany
(parallella)). Furthermore it can cause confusion for incoming C/C++
programmers who would expect float to be an f32.
Variable width floating point code is also dangerous - frequently code
has implicit assumptions about accuracy. Using floating point
correctly is already hard enough, introducing variable width types
makes it even harder.
I would remove float entirely, instead using f32 and f64 exclusively,
also removing the f suffix for float literals. This allows user code
to typedef float to what they want.
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