Unum II announcement

[Nick B via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 at 21:47:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 09:20:23PM +0000, Nick B via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> I do want to clarify, though, that I think at this point 
> implementing unum in the D compiler is almost certainly 
> premature. What I had in mind was more of a unum library that 
> early adopters can use to get a feel for how things would work.
>  If the unum system turns out to have garner enough support 
> that it starts getting hardware support, then it should be 
> relatively easy to transition it into a built-in type.  I don't 
> see this happening for at least another 5-10, though.  It took 
> at least as long (probably longer) for hardware manufacturers 
> to adopt the IEEE standard, and right now unums aren't even 
> standardized yet.
>
>
> T

just a quick update re Unum 2.0

I hope to be able to present a link to the finalised paper on 
Unums within 24 to 48 hours.

Also here, below, is an quick update, on the software development 
on Unums from Prof Gustafson.

"Work is progressing on a reference C implementation on two 
fronts, and I am presently trying to unite the two. One is the 
coding by Isaac Yonemoto, which is being funded by my Singapore 
employer (A*STAR)... which is like having a team of about eight 
programmers, right there. He's an ultra-fast programmer and a 
crack mathematician as well, so he finds amazing shortcuts and 
insights that I don't notice. Isaac tends to code in Julia first, 
and C second. When he does C, he almost does assembler; he 
carefully studies what x86 instructions are available and 
squeezes every cycle.

The other is a small team at UC Santa Cruz with one applied math 
grad student doing most of the coding and a couple of faculty 
advisors (plus me dialing in now and then), and just about has 
plus-minus-times-divide working, the last I heard. This is part 
of an Open Source initiative, so you can bet that this will be 
documented and released into the wild the way open source 
software should be. That one is going for C directly.

There may be other efforts. Some MIT folks also created a Julia 
version of type 2 unums, and it may be almost as fast as C. There 
may be others."