Re: [RFC] Appropriate portable data type for IEEE half-precision on C/C++

[Jonathan Wakely <jwakely.gcc@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2021 at 09:58, Kito Cheng <kito.cheng@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Jonathan:
>
> > I would forget about the decimal types. I thought you were just
> > talking about _Float16?
> >
> > You will need to decide on a mangling for it in C++, which should be
> > co-ordinated with other compilers that are likely to support the type.
> > You could mangle it as "u8_Float16" which is in the namespace reserved
> > for vendor-extensions but if you wanted to assign a new shorter,
> > non-extension then it should be discussed at
> > https://github.com/itanium-cxx-abi/cxx-abi/issues (which will need to
> > happen anyway if std::float16 is expected to go into the C++
> > standard).
> >
> > Are you planning to support this in Clang too?
>
> clang already supports _Float16 on C++ for a while, but only very few targets,
> ARM, AArch64, SPIR and AMDGPU.
>
> > That's documented at
> > http://itanium-cxx-abi.github.io/cxx-abi/abi.html#mangling-builtin
>
> Seems like it is already defined for _FloatN types, and clang already
> follow that.
>
> ::= DF <number> _ # ISO/IEC TS 18661 binary floating point type _FloatN (N bits)
>
> Thank you, Jonathan, I'll start to add that to C++ :)

Oh good, that makes it easy then!