[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: -mieee CFLAG missing on alpha (patch included)

[Andrew A. Gill]

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005, Thomas Cort wrote:
>
> So you see, dividing by zero has the same result whether or not I use
> the -mieee flag. Therefore, I question the validity of the your
> statement that a division by zero FPE was fixed by adding a compiler
> flag that has no effect on division by zero exceptions. I was
> wondering if you could explain to me why exactly adding -mieee on an
> alpha would be a bad solution?

>From the site that you cite:

 	This generally causes less than a 5% performance hit.
 	There are some math-intensive applications where it
 	might cause a greater performance hit

MPlayer is processor-intensive.  Enabling -mieee would cause a 
noticeable performance drop.  This would be a Bad Thing.

Also, there's the possibility that this would pass -mieee to 
the libraries, which might (say it with me, y'all)
BREAK BINARY COMPATIBILITY.  This would be a BAD THING.

(I just checked, and it looks like it will have to 
pass -mieee to libmpdemux.)

The other option is that you write clean code, which causes very 
little performance hit.  I believe that the correction was an 
if-else statement.

-- 
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Bad IEEE!