Minimum floating-point requirements

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2014, Steve Munroe wrote:

> Because I talk to a lot of customers and NOT ONE have asked for
> supporting long double in non default rounding modes. And I can't
> think of one customer that even wants to change the rounding mode.

I can't speak for your customers, but I've certainly seen customers report 
issues with functions overflowing just before the correct start of the 
overflowing range (the sort of case my patch for spurious overflows 
addresses in the underlying arithmetic), and spurious / missing "inexact" 
exceptions on e500 (the last platform I'd expect someone caring about the 
finer points of floating point to be using).  Maybe not for IBM long 
double, but if they were using long double and PowerPC were the platform 
they were using, reports of problems where would seem entirely plausible 
to me.

Given bug reports, especially when there are multiple reports for related 
issues, I prefer to fix the problems at source and increase test coverage 
so that such issues in any libm function, for any floating-point type, 
become visible and get resolved, rather than just fixing the one bug that 
actually got reported when there are lots of related issues that are easy 
to find.

> I would also like to understand how you plan to maintain the
> existing function and performance for customers who are happy
> with the status quo.

I have given plenty of suggestions, e.g. 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2014-02/msg00469.html> and 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2014-02/msg00497.html>, and am sure 
you could think of more if desired.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com