std.math performance (SSE vs. real)

[Chris Cain via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 30 June 2014 at 19:42:34 UTC, Temtaime wrote:
> And my opinion is that real should be deprecated and removed in 
> the future.
> Double is enough.
> If your application depends on float-point accuracy you have 
> problems.

I think that real should be deprecated and removed in favor of a 
library quadruple (binary128) and/or library "real" type. Plus I 
think having some form of decimal64 and decimal128 types (despite 
being non-native and slower) would be highly appreciated as well. 
I'm siding with Walter that precision is important and we should 
make it easy to get more precision at the cost of speed (of 
course, fast float/double ops should be fully supported as well). 
Obviously better algorithms that require less precision is the 
ideal approach, but we shouldn't assume that users will want to 
spend time on better algorithms. Offering easy-to-accomplish 
accuracy is a good feature as long as the difficult-to-accomplish 
better accuracy with higher performance is also possible.

I think having even more precise types you can count on for 
different situations is better. I dunno if that will actually 
change, but maybe we could implement the library versions and see 
if Walter ends up liking that approach better.