WordPtr,IntPtr,IntMax,WordMax

Ben Rudiak-Gould Benjamin.Rudiak-Gould at cl.cam.ac.uk
Thu May 11 08:21:00 EDT 2006


John Meacham wrote:
> also, incidentally, for anyone on x86 that cares about math performance,
> use -optc-fsse2 to make it use the much nicer math coprocessor available
> on modern x86 cpus.

I object to its characterization as "nicer". It's faster, but *lower 
precision*. It worries me that people are so blithely abandoning those extra 
bits in the name of speed. A few years from now there's going to be an 
expensive engineering failure, and months of investigation will reveal that 
it was because a math library was compiled for SSE2. Be careful out there.

(And while I'm on the subject, Haskell should have a LongDouble type.)

-- Ben



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