std.math performance (SSE vs. real)

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 30 June 2014 at 11:57:04 UTC, Don wrote:
> And if you perform a division using integers, you've silently 
> lost precision.

2 ints of arbitrary length = rational numbers => no loss of 
precision for divs.

CPU vendors make arbitrary decisions about FP and break 
compliance with no remorse for single precision float vector 
operations in order to reduce die size / increase throughput. 
That includes not having NaN/Inf, reducing mantissa precision for 
some operations, etc.

FP is not portable out-of-the-box.

I think the main advantage of integers is that you control the 
precision and can repeat the calculation with the same result. It 
is easier to avoid stability issues with integers too. And it is 
portable.