[wayne@cs.toronto.edu: cygwin-1.5.5 sscanf on floats: 20 times slower than 2 years ago]

[Christopher Faylor]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 03:50:18PM -0500, J. Johnston wrote:
>J. Johnston wrote:
>>Wayne Hayes wrote:
>>
>>>>Since scanf and the floating point arithmetic is implemented in newlib,
>>>>I've redirected this message there.  Does anybody have an idea, what
>>>>could slow down float scanning in sscanf by a factor of 20?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Thanks!  Just to be pedentic, I realized that it's worse than a factor 
>>>of 20.
>>>My *entire simulation* slows down by a factor of 20; there's significant
>>>other computation in it.  So the scanf slowdown is probably closer to
>>>hundreds of times.  *Something* fishy must be going on.  :-)
>>>
>>
>>The reason for the slow down is long double support.  A new routine 
>>_strtold is used instead of _strtod_r.  I am working on a patch to use 
>>the old routine for non-long-doubles to avoid the slow down.
>
>Patch checked in.

I'm generating a new snapshot now:  http://cygwin.com/snapshots.html .
It will be interesting to hear if this solves the problem.

Btw, would using hardware floating point help here at all?  I managed to
get newlib to build with hardware floating point earlier but I wasn't
sure what the consequences of doing that would be (other than the fact
that cygwin wouldn't work on a x386).

cgf