On Monday, 19 November 2012 at 19:14:43 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
I'd never even _heard_ of half types before this discussion
came up. But then
again, the same goes for SIMD. And IIRC, there was some sort of
function
attribute relating to pointers and registers that you or some
other gaming
person was insisting on a while back, and I'd never heard of it
existing in
C++ either (as an extension or otherwise). You clearly program
in a very
different world than I do. I care about high performance in
what I do but
nothing on _that_ level. I suspect that this is another one of
those things
that certain folks would really like to have, and most of the
rest of us don't
have any real interest in and often know nothing about in the
first place. I
don't know that I really care whether it's added to the
language though. I'll
leave that sort of decision up to Walter.
If anything, I just find it interesting how many low level
things folks like
you keep coming up with as must-haves or very strong wants that
I've never
even heard of and will almost certainly never care about aside
perhaps from
how having them in D might help D catch on.
- Jonathan M Davis
Anyone interested in the low precision float types, and what they
are good for, can start here
http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Small_Float_Formats
I did not read through all of this thread, but my guess is that
the people making the request for half float are mostly into game
development and image processing.
When I first started investigating D as a potential C++
replacement, I noted that a lot of the "visible" development
(what I could see being publicized) was game development, so it
seemed that for some reason a lot of the D users were also game
developers, so there's perhaps something about D that they find
attractive.
Why game devs are interested so much in D is interesting
considering the GC is noted to be a problem for game devs. The
work of H. S. Teoh comes to mind with his work on a game engine,
that pushed the limits of the GC and std lib.
In any case, the point is that I don't think the D community
should overlook what the game devs are doing, they're pushing D
to its limits and are making D more visible than perhaps anyone.
--rt
