[racket-dev] long double for racket

At Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:01:30 -0500, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 8:18 PM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> > At Sat, 29 Dec 2012 14:05:08 +0300, Michael Filonenko wrote:
> >> I have prepared a new version of the patch (attached).
> >
> > Thanks!
> 
> A question on the design here: why not make extflonums part of the
> numeric tower?

I thought about this, and it was tempting to try, but including
extflonums in the numeric tower appears to require a lot more code:
extra cases in arithmetic functions to handle extflonums and select
coercions when extflonums are combined with other values.

Since the intent of extflonums is (I believe) to use them with other
extflonums for precision and speed, it seems like a good place to
experiment with non-`number?' numbers.

> Also, when are extflonums *not* likely to be available?  Only on
> non-x86 processors?

They're also not available on x86 processors when Racket is compiled to
use x87 floating-point operations for flonums (in the C implementations
of primitives). I think x87 floating point is still the default on most
32-bit x86 platforms so that the executables run on old processors.

Also, the C compiler must support extended precision via the `long
double' type (for the C implementation of extflonum primitives). On
Windows via MSVC, that rules out even 64-bit builds. We may be able to
improve that situation, though.

Overall, expect extflonums on non-Windows x86_64 platforms plus Mac OS
X x86.