On 15/01/2025 11:16 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/14/2025 6:34 AM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
>> Also did you see my email from the day after the meeting?
> 
> No. What was the subject title?

"DFA - a potential strategy?"

Oh and expect Bruce to want to talk about it next local meetup!

On 1/14/2025 12:33 AM, ryuukk_ wrote:
> What the young competition doing?

I implemented halffloat a decade ago. It didn't go into the library then because there was zero interest in it.

On 1/14/2025 2:19 PM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> "DFA - a potential strategy?"
> 
> Oh and expect Bruce to want to talk about it next local meetup!
> 

Ok, I found it.

On Tuesday, 14 January 2025 at 22:14:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> The interesting thing is not the existence of the types. It's how they are implemented. The X86_64 architecture does not support a 16 bit floating point type.

It had some limited support starting from 2018 had AVX512-FP16.
And some newer models of x86 support both FP16 and BF16.

* https://networkbuilders.intel.com/docs/networkbuilders/intel-avx-512-fp16-instruction-set-for-intel-xeon-processor-based-products-technology-guide-1651874188.pdf

* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49995594/half-precision-floating-point-arithmetic-on-intel-chips

Also it is important for AI/ML models, which can run on ARM CPUs, GPUs and TPUs

I didn't know that. Thanks for the info.

On Tuesday, 14 January 2025 at 06:13:04 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> _Float16 is new in C23 Appendix H.11-6
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/issues/20516
>
> For the moment, I submitted a PR with a workaround:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/20699
>
> Amazingly, some years ago I implemented 16 bit floats in D:
>
> https://github.com/DigitalMars/sargon/blob/master/src/sargon/halffloat.d
>
> Would anyone like to put halffloat.d into Druntime and make it our implementation of _Float16?

that is the obvious way for dmd.