Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
John Meacham wrote:
also, incidentally, for anyone on x86 that cares about math performance, use -optc-fsse2 to make it use the much nicer math coprocessor available on modern x86 cpus.
I object to its characterization as "nicer". It's faster, but *lower precision*. It worries me that people are so blithely abandoning those extra bits in the name of speed. A few years from now there's going to be an expensive engineering failure, and months of investigation will reveal that it was because a math library was compiled for SSE2. Be careful out there.
On the other hand, keeping intermediate Doubles to 80-bit precision is both (a) non-portable and (b) unpredictable (the programmer doesn't know which intermediates are going to be stored in 80 bits, and turning on optimisation will probably make a difference). I suppose you might argue that "extra precision is always good". But I like it when Haskell programs give the same results, regardless of the platform, compilation strategy, and level of optimisation.
(And while I'm on the subject, Haskell should have a LongDouble type.)
LongDouble would be fine, but storing intermediate Doubles in 80 bits is bad. Cheers, Simon