On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 6:20 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

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-problems-you-didnt-even-know-you-had/

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.