[DGD] 64-bit platform question

[Shentino]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Felix A. Croes <felix at dworkin.nl> wrote:

> bart at wotf.org wrote:
>
> > Its one of the reasons why 64bit lpc ints would be useful to have, even
> with
> > the availability of asn.
> >
> > I'd be glad to create a subproject for 64bit ints if someone wants to
> make a
> > start on this.
>
> I had already freed up two instructions for this.  Instruction 0 is
> reserved for PUSH_INT8, and instruction 1 is for a big float.
>
> Big floats gave me trouble.  LPC floats must be capable of representing
> all integer values without loss of precision, but not so large that they
> increase the size of the value struct.  80 bits would be ideal, but only
> one platform has native support for those.
>

Just curious, what platforms don't support it?  And why?

I'm aware that the x86 FPU has hardware support for it, and that at least in
Visual C++, long doubles are silently coerced as doubles (IMHO, cuz
microsoft wussed out and handicapped itself for the sake of non x86 archs).

Apart from those two tidbits though I know zilch.

Currently floating point arithmetic is all simulated in C (so that DGD
> also offers floats on platforms without hardware floating point), which
> is reasonably efficient.  I don't consider this to be an option for a
> much larger mantissa, though.
>
> Regards,
> Felix Croes
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