[fpc-devel] 64 Bit / 32 Bit

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Thu, 4 Oct 2007, schreef Jonas Maebe:

> 
> On 04 Oct 2007, at 12:36, Daniël Mantione wrote:
> 
> > Still, we're planning to support the extended on all platforms by means
> > of
> > softfloat.
> 
> I don't think it would be a good idea to map the extended type to 80 bit soft
> float on platforms that don't support 80 bit fpu calculations in hardware.
> Many programs use "extended" by default without actually requiring 80 bit
> precision, and mapping those all to soft float would needlessly slow down such
> programs.
> 
> I think a separate type would be more appropriate.

Hmmm... I prefer to keep correct code that writes say, an extended type to 
a file working, over keeping code that falsely uses extended precision 
fast, especially as I expect people to correct such code anyway to take 
advantage of SSE performance.

In such case "extended" would also be a misleading name, since it would 
get "long double" semantics. Even worse, it would be a TP compatible 
extended on i386 and some x86_64 platforms and long double on other 
platforms.

Daniël