Re: [boost] [endian] Testing floating point interoperability

Subject: Re: [boost] [endian] Testing floating point interoperability
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-22 09:12:43

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 4:47 PM, Rob Stewart <rob.stewart_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On March 20, 2015 9:40:22 AM EDT, Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> But for Microsoft in debug mode, certain bit patterns do not
>> round-trip correctly. For example, 7f810000 becomes 7fc10000. (Those
>> are little endian representations).
>>
>> So what should Boost.Endian do? There is less than two weeks left
>> before 1.58.0 ships, and even if this turns out to be a bug in the
>> Microsoft compiler, it is likely to cause user problems.
>>
>> The most conservative approach is to remove the return-by-value
>> reverse functions, and note in the docs that only in-place reverse is
>> available for FP. That will give us more time to determine if
>> return-by-value endianness reverse is valid for floating point.
>
> Until you have a good handle on the issue, you should not release the functionality as stable and vetted.

Understood. That's been uppermost in my mind.

> You might just use a macro to enable those functions as experimental.

I'm going to remove all return-by-value functions, including for
integers, and there isn't time to do that for 1.58.0. So Boost.Endian
will have to wait for 1.59.0.

Sigh...

Thanks,

--Beman