This is a software implementation of the ieee754 floating point format for any size with any configuration for exponent, mantissa and bias values, allowing you to create any size floating point format when unavailable by the hardware.
Notable examples are 'half-precision' floating points (also known as binary16) used in graphic processing hardware not available on modern CPUs, or needed for compact network transmission of floating points.
Most hardware today only supports 32bit (single precision) and 64bit (double precision) floating points in hardware, without support for other sizes that are useful when compactness is needed.
Currently the library is capable of supporting almost correct arithmetic operations and is binary compatible with other floating point implementations of same requested size (for example, binary32).
- Algebraic functions are not implemented yet
- Floating points larger than 64bit cannot be represented
- Arithmetic operations with infinity results into incorrect results
- Casting of ±NaN or ±Infinity into a signed or unsigned is incorrect
To compile the unit tests you'll need libgtest. To compile, run:
g++ -O2 -Iincludes -std=c++11 tests/*.cpp -lgtest -lgtest_main -lpthread -o soft-ieee754-test
Then run the executable soft-ieee754-test