Re: bigint/bugnum library
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jul 13, 2013
- 1784 views
Not sure this counts, as we can get away with doing it in inline assembly or using machine code.
ARM
I was thinking SPARC and PPC as well, but they are capable of using software 128-bit doubles. So is 64-bit ARM I believe.
Hmm. I guess I thought of ARM as a purely 32bit platform.
I would have thought that all platforms were capable of using 128bit doubles via software emulation, through e.g. http://www.mpfr.org/ (though if we only need 80bit maybe we can find a way to leverage http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Soft-float-library-routines.html )
For 32-bit Euphoria, 64-bit doubles are the norm, even if they use 80 bits for intermediate results.
Right, on 32bit it's largely a non-issue. But on 64bit platforms, we need a floating point type that's bigger than the integer type, as stuff inside the interpreter and runtime library make this assumption, and though it's possible to rewrite the insides to avoid this, it'd probably mean a lot of Euphoria code would also need to be rewritten.
