On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 6:20 AM, Doug McIlroy
Last I looked (admittedly quite a while ago), the state of the art was strtod in http://www.netlib.org/fp/dtoa.c. (Alas, dtoa.c achieves calculational perfection via a murmuration of #ifdefs.)
That was indeed the state of the art for about three decades, until Florian Loitsch showed up in 2010 with an algorithm that is usually far faster: http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2011/06/29/here-be-dragons-advances-in-proble... Unfortunately, although I've written Haskell bindings to his library, said library is written in C++, and our FFI support for C++ libraries is negligible and buggy. As a result, that code is disabled by default. It's disheartening to hear that important Haskell code has
needlessly fallen from perfection--perhaps even deliberately.
Indeed (and yes, it's deliberate). If I had the time to spare, I'd attempt to fix the situation by porting Loitsch's algorithm to Haskell or C, but either one would be a lot of work - the library is 5,600 lines of tricky code.