Hi - thank you for this. I was unaware of the “constant folding” in GCC (and I’m surprised it works for functions like asinh), but I can see that it explains the difference in behaviour.

So I think this is a (possibly minor) bug that Haskell inherits from mingw-w64. I guess I should raise a GHC issue – though I’m not sure whether it would be best to try to fix within Haskell or within mingw-w64.

Also, I think the FloatFnInverses.hs test doesn’t should be showing as a fail somewhere in the CI testing. (It doesn’t give the expected output when I run it on Windows). Do you know whether/where I can see that? (I don’t know what CI happens or how to view its output).

Thanks again,

David.

From: arata, mizuki
Sent: 03 September 2021 13:43
To: David James
Cc: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Trouble with asinh (c calls with Doubles) in Windows

Hi David,

If I understand correctly, GHC uses mingw-w64’s libc implementation on Windows.
Since mingw-w64’s math functions are not of very good quality, it is likely that asinh returns NaN for a very large input.

As to why `asinh(1.7976931348623157e308)` in CAsinh.c produces (seemingly-correct) 710.4758, it is probably because the C compiler (GCC) uses a different implementation of asinh when doing constant folding.
As a note, you may get a different (compile-time computed) result for `asinh(x)` if you set a more aggressive optimization flag.

Mizuki