Publishing the "generic-flonum" package

Added: January 21, 2021
Last updated: March 7, 2021

As a side effect of recent work, I created an alternate MPFR interface in Racket. I posted in the previous blog, that I was planning on extracting that code into a package for public use. As of today, that library has officially been cleaned up, documented, and published in the Racket Package Index. To try it out, install Racket and run raco pkg install generic-flonum. Here is an excerpt from the documentation.

While the math/bigfloat interface is sufficient for most high-precision computing, it is lacking in a couple areas. Mainly, it does not properly emulate subnormal arithmetic or allow the exponent range to be changed.

Normally, neither of these problems cause concern. For example, if a user intends to find an approximate value for some computation on the reals, then subnormal arithmetic or a narrower exponent range is not particular useful. However, if a user wants to know the result of a computation specifically in some format, say half-precision, then math/bigfloat is insufficient.

At half-precision, (exp -10) and (exp 20) evaluate to 4.5419e-05 and +inf.0, respectively. On the other hand, evaluating (bfexp (bf -10)) and (bfexp (bf -10)) with (bf-precision 11) returns (bf "4.5389e-5") and (bf "#e4.8523e8"). While the latter results are certainly more accurate, they do not reflect proper behavior in half-precision. The standard bigfloat library does not subnormalize the first result (no subnormal arithmetic), nor does it recognize the overflow in the second result (fixed exponent range).

This library fixes the issues mentioned above by automatically emulating subnormal arithmetic when necessary and providing a way to change the exponent range. In addition, the interface is quite similar to math/bigfloat, so it will feel familiar to anyone who has used the standard bigfloat library before. There are also a few extra operations from the C math library such as gflfma, gflmod, and gflremainder that the bigfloat library does not support.

See math/bigfloat for more information on bigfloats.

To read more of the documentation, please visit here. The source code for the package can be found at this repository. In the future, I plan on integrating this into the FPBench reference interpreter, so we can finally emulate subnormal arithmetic for various floating-point formats correctly. This has been an outstanding issue for a long time.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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