Unum II announcement

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 05:08:13AM +0000, Nick B via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> "For those of you who think you have already seen unums, this is a
> different approach. Every one of the slides here is completely new and
> has not been presented before the Multicore 2016 conference [in Wgtn,
> NZ]."
> 
> Here is the link as promised to the new presentation by John
> Gustafson: http://www.johngustafson.net/unums.html
> 
> 
> I strongly recommend that you download the presentation [Powerpoint,
> 35 pages] as there are lots of Notes with the presentation.
[...]

This is very interesting, and looks more promising than the previous
unum presentation.

While it's too early to hope for a hardware implementation, I'm
interested in implementing a software emulation in D.  D's powerful
templating system could let us experiment with various implementation
possibilities (e.g., different word sizes, variable size vs. fixed
sizes, etc.), to get a feel for how it would work in real-life.  With
the appropriate operator overloading, we might even be able to make it
behave as if it were a hardware type.  If the implementation is complete
enough, it might even be possible to use it in numerical code if you
don't mind the slower performance of the software emulation layer.


T

-- 
"Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. :-)" -- Larry Wall