On 11/18/2012 4:31 PM, Manu wrote:
If I told you this is how real should be implemented, would you vote ++? What about double? Why? Why not float for that matter? There seems like no reason for the language to define any floating point type at all if you consider this acceptable...
Because they are implemented in hardware. It's pretty dang hard for a compiler to look at a floating point emulator and figure out "gee, I have a nice hardware instruction that does the same thing as this 2K of code!"
'half' isn't some custom float for niche use, it's an established standard, implemented in vastly more hardware than implements 'real'.
It's implemented in GPUs, sure, but it is it implemented in hardware that D runs on? (I do know about this: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Half_002dPrecision.html)
There is no major technical difficulty in implementing it as a basic type, but I want to be sure we've exhausted the library approach first.
