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by jhgb 1540 days ago
The question is if you wouldn't be better served with double-doubles today. You get ~100 bits of mantissa AND you can still vectorize your computations.
1 comments

Sure. There should be a gcc flag to make "long double" become quadruple precision.

The thing is, my first programming language was x86 assembler and the fpu was the funniest part. Spent weeks as a teenager writing almost pure 8087 code. I have a lot of emotional investment in that tiny rolling stack of extended precision floats.

How is "quad floating point" implemented on x86? Is it software emulation?