80 bit floating point emulator

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Sunday, 6 February 2022 at 12:20:01 UTC, max haughton wrote:
> 80 bits actually exists in the hardware.

Yes, IIRC it is partial hardware partial microcode in later 
generations. Intel has considered it to be legacy instructions 
for 20 years…

> real isn't defined to be 80bits, it's just the widest float 
> available in the hardware.

Yes, which is why I wonder why people would want 80 bits in 
software. If you do it in software it probably is better to use a 
struct with independent fields rather than bit-packing.

The demand for more than 64 bits is low, I think people that want 
this will use a well tested and maintained multi-precision 
library.