What features of D you would not miss?

[Walter Bright]

On 9/18/2022 12:50 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> 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.

Just like with cars where there is no substitute for horsepower, there's no 
substitute for extra precision.

Yes, there are known techniques for dealing with roundoff error, but these are 
complex and tricky and are for experts in this sort of thing. Adding more 
precision often "just works" for the rest.


> (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.)

I didn't know about this. Is there an article on how it works?