@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place
Post #2797258
2026-04-14 22:04 UTC
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place @lisyarus@mastodon.gamedev.place My point being, legislating any particular evaluation strategy was wholly impractical until at least the 2010s or so.
At this point it would be a lot more reasonable. It's just that we have a path-dependency where both the compiler options and the standards come from a world where insisting that things be nailed down in a particular way was simply impractical, and what compiler support there is for turning this off is also what used to be a total niche feature.
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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-04-14 22:06
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place @lisyarus@mastodon.gamedev.place Because in the 90s, if you're porting numerical SW to say a PPC, you wouldn't want to not use FMAs, for the most part. That's making a lot of things 2x more expensive because even just basic FP mul and FP add on that HW would execute as FMAs, and their was only one FP arithmetic unit which was the FMA unit! Standards have more recently started to try to tighten down on things but it's just a hard retro-fit due to many historical accidents.