Re: bug 10491 was Re: More astonishing progress in japi scores

[Archie Cobbs]

Per Bothner wrote:
> >>>If the strtod in glibc is threadsafe *and* accurate, then we should
> >>>probably use it, at least as a default.
> >>
> >>Dalibor Topic said on IRC that it has some problems on Irix. So it might
> >>not be a good idea. So perhaps adding a special case would be best, or
> >>you could solve it upstream by adding support for NaN and infinity to
> >>newlib.
> > 
> > Not everybody uses Linux, so what glibc does is not entirely relevant..
> 
> glibc is the *GNU* C library, so it's obviously not Linux-specific.
> Classpath is the *GNU* Java library, so it isn't unreasonable to
> optimize for the glibc case.  If on non-glibc platforms floating-point
> conversion isn't quite as exact as the spec requires, fixing that is
> not a priority.  Of course if somebody wants to work on a more portable
> solution, that is great, as lang as it doesn't penalize the glibc case.

Semi-agreed.. I just don't like having dependencies on non-standard
features. E.g., if POSIX specifies that strtod() should handle
"NaN", then that's fine. OTOH, if "NaN" is a glibc-only extension
that Classpath relies on, then that's more problematic; it means
Classpath would be broken on all *BSD operating systems for example.

-Archie

__________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs      *        CTO, Awarix        *      http://www.awarix.com