Free42 with IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating-point -- interested in a sneak preview?

[Thomas Okken]

Hi all,

I'm working on replacing the BCD20 floating-point library in Free42 Decimal with the Intel Decimal Floating-Point Math Library.

Link: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles...th-library
Link to Free42 for those who don't know what I'm talking about: http://thomasokken.com/free42/

I currently have this running on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, and expect to have it working for Windows and OS X next weekend (March 1 or 2), if not sooner. Android will follow soon after; iOS will take a bit longer because I have to make some non-floating-point-related changes to add proper support for the iPhone 5's larger screen, since Apple will no longer accept apps without such support.

The new floating-point library has a slightly smaller dynamic range than BCD20 (exponents between a little under -6000 and a little over +6000, as opposed to -10000 through +9999), but it has 34-digit precision, up from 25 in BCD20, and it supports denormal numbers and unbiased rounding.

I haven't done any performance tests yet, but I expect the new library to be faster, since it stores numbers in a more efficient format.

If anyone is interested in playing with this before the official release, drop me a line and I'll send you the 32-bit and/or 64-bit Linux build, or any of the others as soon as I am able to build them -- or the source code, for anyone who would like to take a swing at building it themselves.

Cheers!

- Thomas