GDC release 0.23

Walter Bright newshound at digitalmars.com
Wed Mar 7 22:23:45 PST 2007


Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
> Anders F Björklund wrote:
>>> ...
>>>
>>> Seriously, the viability of D as a numeric computing platform is at
>>> stake here.
>> Only on the PowerPC platform, though. Maybe on SPARC too, not sure.
>> (it might have real 128-bit ?) But not on the DMD platform: Intel,
>> there it will have full 80-bit support (even if not too portable).
>>
>> --anders
> 
> Make that x86... I read somewhere a few days ago that there IS no 80-bit
> real type on x86-64 machines; AMD basically went "80-bit?  Who the hell
> uses that junk?  Just use SSE you pack of anachronistic pansies!" and
> nuked the x87 in 64-bit code (you can still use it, but ONLY in 32-bit
> code).

The 80 bit ops are available on the AMD-64 in 64 bit mode. But 
Microsoft's original plan for 80 bit reals was to not save them during a 
context switch, meaning you couldn't use them. I know a few people at 
Microsoft <g>, and made a pitch that the 80 bit regs should be saved, 
and they fixed it.


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