On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Rainer Orth <ro at cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de> wrote: > James Carlson <carlsonj at workingcode.com> writes: > >>> To be honest, I myself did not yet read this TR, and that in particular is >>> due to the >>> fact that we did not have any requests to support it till this very moment. >>> >>> Eventually we will, but we need to prioritize. >>> And getting external interest for the feature helps putting proper >>> priorities. >> >> No doubt. And to amplify the point: none of the organizations here are >> operating as charities, so if there are paying customers asking through >> the appropriate channels (their local sales and support folks) to have >> work prioritized, that goes *much* further to getting work funded. >> >> Apart from that, there is another path. Anyone who wants to can put >> together the proposed new ABI, modify some open source compiler to >> comply, and run the architectural bits through the ARC. If the Sun >> Studio team can contribute, that's great, but if that team's priorities >> are elsewhere, I see nothing at all wrong with having the community >> members with an interest in this driving the effort rather than just >> "asking" for the work to be done. > > Agreed: my mail didn't intend to demand the work being done by the > Studio and libc teams, but to determine if there was ongoing work in the > area. It would be foolish to start anything in this area without first > making sure that nobody else went there before. > > That said, I doubt that I've got the spare time to define a decimal > float on SPARC ABI myself and drive that through SPARC International for > acceptance. After all, both my GCC and OpenSolaris work are spare-time > activities. What I might try is use the established x86/amd64 ABI and > try to get GCC to support decimal float on Solaris/x86 and see if I can > adapt existing code with appropriate licenses (i.e. not GPL) for the > necessary libc additions.
IBM's decnumber [http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/decnumber] has a CDDL and CPL1.0 compatible license. Irek
