On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.org> wrote:
> Mathias Bynens wrote:
>
>> On 1 Aug 2014, at 09:25, Carl Shapiro<carl.shapiro at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Thanks for the suggestion.
>>> > > As Ray pointed out, the Math package in Java still has its
>>> accuracy requirements specified and so it is not analogous to the current
>>> status of Math package in ES6. Also, the StrictMath package and the
>>> strictfp class qualifier came about in Java back when the x87 was the
>>> predominant FPU. Because of the idiosyncrasies of the x87 one could not
>>> compute bit-identical floating point results without additional overhead.
>>> Nevertheless, the accuracy requirements and conformance was still achieved
>>> with satisfactory performance. Much of the history is still available
>>> on-line
>>> > > http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics/reports/jgfnwg-minutes-6-00.html
>>> > http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics/reports/jgfnwg-02.html
>>> > > It is unclear how much of these "strict" modes is still relevant
>>> given that SSE2 is now the predominant FPU. The strict modes were always
>>> effectively a non-issue on other architectures.
>>> > > Much of the pressure to relax the accuracy of the special
>>> functions seems to be coming from their use in various benchmark suites and
>>> the tireless efforts of the compiler engineers to squeeze out additional
>>> performance gains. Requiring bounds on the accuracy of the special
>>> functions has the additional benefit of putting all the browsers on equal
>>> ground so nobody has to have their product suffer the indignity of a
>>> benchmark loss because they try to do the right thing in the name of
>>> numerical accuracy.
>>>
>>
>> +1
>>
>> Introducing a new global `Math` variant wouldn’t solve the
>> interoperability issues. IMHO, the accuracy of the existing `Math` methods
>> and properties should be codified in the spec instead.
>>
>
> Right, we are not going to add StrictMath.
>
> The notes from this week's TC39 meeting at Microsoft will be published
> soon, some time next week, but to cut to the chase: we agreed to specify
> harder and stop the benchmarketing race to the bottom, as Carl suggested.
> We will need f.p. gurus helping review the work, for sure. Thanks to all of
> you contributing here.
>
This is really great news!
>
> /be
>
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domenic at domenicdenicola.com (2014-08-07T15:59:15.329Z)
