bigfloat

[Don]

Paul D. Anderson wrote:
> Is there an active project to develop arbitrary-precision floating point numbers for D?

> 
> I've got a little extra time at the moment and would like to contribute if I can. I've done some work in floating point arithmetic and would be willing to start/complete/add to/test/design/etc. such a project. What I hope NOT to do is to re-implement someone else's perfectly adequate code.

That would be fantastic.

> If no such project exists I'd like to start one. If there are a bunch of half-finished attempts (I have one of those), let's pool our efforts.

I began the BigInt project in Tango in order to be able to create 
BigFloat. So far, I've done very little on BigFloat itself -- I've got 
side-tracked on other things. It would be awesome if you could do some 
floating-point work. Probably, you'll need some more primitive 
operations than are currently provided.
(Key BigInt primitives which are currently missing are sqrt, pow, and 
gcd; you probably also need more access to the internals).

The Tango BigInt will become part of Phobos2 sooner or later -- actually 
  it's almost entirely a stand-alone project, the only thing directly 
linking it to Tango is the module names, so it doesn't really matter if 
you develop in Tango or Phobos.

Note that my Bigint asm primitives are in most cases slightly faster 
than the ones provided by GMP <g>.


> I know several contributors here have a strong interest and/or background in numerics. I'd like to hear inputs regarding:
> 
> a) the merits (or lack) of having an arbitrary-precision floating point type
> 
> b) the features and functions that should be included.

Just begin with basic arithmetic.

> 
> Just to be clear -- I'm talking about a library addition here, not a change in the language.
> 
> Paul
> 
>