Fixing C's Biggest Mistake

[Timon Gehr]

On 1/8/23 06:51, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> I don't think that's a very apt take *at all*.  Frankly it's 
>> insulting.  You do realize video games are a *business*, right? They 
>> absolutely care about correctness and corruption.
> 
> Sorry I made it sound that way. Nobody is going to die if the display is 
> a bit off. And the reason video game developers asked for D to support 
> half-floats is because of speed, not accuracy. (It's in the Sargon 
> library now.)
> 
> John Carmack famously used the fast inverse square root algorithm that 
> was faster, but less accurate, than the usual method.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

It's not "less accurate". John Carmack decides what the rules of the 
game are. This is not comparable at all to the game crashing with a 
segmentation fault in the middle of an online multiplayer session...