What features of D you would not miss?

[Timon Gehr]

On 18.09.22 08:47, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 September 2022 at 08:40:22 UTC, Dukc wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 14 September 2022 at 05:58:53 UTC, Walter Bright wrote 
>> (on the thread about binary literals):
>>> On 9/13/2022 7:56 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>>> But it doesn't disprove the fact that *sometimes*, hex digits aren't 
>>>> as clear.
>>>
>>> Does sometimes justify a language feature, when there are other ways?
>>>
>>> People often complain that D has too many features. What features 
>>> would you say are not worth it?
>>
>> This is a good question, but would quickly derail the original thread 
>> from it's topic, so I decided to start a new one.
>>
>> What features could be removed from D if it were up to you? Please 
>> consider the breakage that would result from the removal, don't settle 
>> on thinking what shouldn't have been added in the first place.
> 
> real, specifically x86 80-bit,
> * its slow, you can't vectorise it
> * the extra precision isn't much use
> * use is often unintentional, and when it is the intention is almost 
> always misguided. If you have precision problems a couple of bits of 
> extra precision won't make up for a horrible convergence rate and if it 
> does, you probably need an arbitrary precision type anyway.

As someone who has had to hack 80 bit floating point support into C++ on 
Windows with inline assembly, I am glad it is supported. Unintentional 
use should be curbed though. Also, the added precision is more than a 
couple of bits and sometimes you just need that resolution. 80 bit 
floats are faster than arbitrary precision floats, so it provides a nice 
performance boost in that region, before you have to fall back on 
software solutions. (There is a trick where you use two or more doubles 
to represent a number with more mantissa bits though and it is possible 
that with AVX, performance may be competitive with 80 bit floats, but 
vectorising that code manually is more work.)