Tools that help handle floating-point dragons
There be dragons is a common refrain in any discussion involving code containing floating-point. The dragons are not likely to disappear anytime soon, but there has been a lot of progress since my 2011...
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Tool for tuning the use of floating-point types
A common problem when writing code that performs floating-point arithmetic is figuring out which of the available three (usually) possible floating-point types to use (e.g., float, double or long...
View ArticleSuperoptimizers are back in vogue
There has always been the need for a few developer with in-depth knowledge of a particular cpu architecture to sit down and think very hard about how best to implement a snippet of code performing some...
View ArticleInitial impressions of RangeLab
I was rummaging around in the source of R looking for trouble, as one does, when I came across what I believed to be a less than optimally accurate floating-point algorithm (function R_pos_di in...
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Optimizing floating-point expressions for accuracy
Floating-point arithmetic is one topic that most compiler writers tend to avoid as much as possible. The majority of programs don’t use floating-point (i.e., low customer demand), much of the analysis...
View ArticleAutomatically improving code
Compared to 20 or 30 years ago we know a lot more about the properties of algorithms and better ways of doing things often exist (e.g., more accurate, faster, more reliable, etc). The problem with this...
View ArticleSearching for inaccurate literals in R
In creating the numbers tool I wanted to be able to do two things, 1) obtain information about what source did by matching the numeric literals it contained against a database of ‘interesting’ values...
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Quality comparison of floating-point maths libraries
What is the best way to compare the quality of floating-point math libraries (e.g., sin, cos and log)? The traditional approach for evaluating the quality of an algorithm implementing a mathematical...
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Number of digits in floating-point literals
Some of the interesting floating-point literals detected by the numbers program not only look uninteresting but plain wrong. For instance, almost every program I analyze appears to contain a literal...
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Variations in the literal representation of Pi
The numbers system I am developing attempts to match numeric literals contained in a file against a database of interesting numbers. One of the things I did to quickly build a reasonably sized database...
View ArticleUsing numeric literals to identify application domains
I regularly get to look at large quantities of source and need to quickly get some idea of the application domains used within the code; for instance, statistical calculations, atomic physics or...
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Designing a processor for increased source portability costs
How might a vendor make it difficult for developers to port open source applications to their proprietary cpu? Keeping the instruction set secret is one technique, another is to design a cpu that...
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