Hi Damian —
We definitely adopted the real(n)/int(n) syntax in Chapel with an eye
toward eventually supporting int(128) or real(128) or real(96) or the like
(which at the time we thought was much closer to being important than it's
turned out to be) or real(16), int(1), or the like going the other way.
To date, though, we haven't had compelling cases that have caused us to
chase after implementing such variations (either in terms of use cases or,
as you note, hardware), so they've languished. But I don't think there's
anything significant that would prevent us from adding them to Chapel
ultimately. It's definitely the case that support from back-end compilers
(which support in C would help with) would ease the ability to support
such features; otherwise, we have to plumb them all the way through
ourselves.
Hope this is useful,
-Brad
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020, Damian McGuckin wrote:
The new C2X standard in train with _Float16 and _Float128.
Are there any discussions of the same for Chapel?
From my own perspective, will there be support within Chapel 1.28 (maybe) for
[u]int(128) as well. This is critical for portable/generic handling of
operations on 128bit quantities.
I notice that no current chipset has such a thing in hardware. Ouch.
A while aho, when I raised this point casually in a C language discussion
group within the context of the first statement, there was very little
interest there. I was asking it from perspective of an unsigned integer's use
in pulling apart a floating point quantity and was reminded that this is very
non-standard. That said, when you approach things that way, the code is far
clearer, cleaner, easy to read and GENERIC. Mind you, I might have phrased
the question poorly and I admit that my interest is selfish. But you get the
drift.
That said, I just saw that there is a demand bubbling along which wants the
ability to address than a 64-bit address will provide. It was in the context
of meganetworks. So I no longer feel that my own request is quite so unusual.
Comments?
I did raise this on Github but it has seen no traffic/interest.
Regards - Damian
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