Re: GADT printer patch

[Stephen Dolan <stephen.dolan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Such an implementation would probably be some variant of
http://www.netlib.org/fp/dtoa.c
It turns out that formatting floats involves implementing a small
bigint library (!).

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Right, I want to separate float formatting anyway. Some libraries (notably
> FreeBSD's libkern printf) don't do floats at all, so separating those cleanly
> in the OCaml layer would be lovely.
>
> Currently, the whole format string gets shoved to vsnprintf(3).  With this
> patch, we just need an implementation of caml_format_float, but not all the
> other bits of printf.
>
> -anil
>
> On 22 May 2013, at 14:56, Stephen Dolan <Stephen.Dolan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> It still requires sprintf. In particular, it uses caml_format_float to
>> do %f and friends, which uses sprintf internally. Correct float
>> formatting is a surprisingly large amount of code.
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>> On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> This is really neat:
>>> http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6017
>>>
>>> If I understand it right, it eliminates our need for the printf dietlibc 
>>> bits, which means we could simplify mirage-platform quite a bit!
>>>
>>> Should cook up an OPAM compiler patch to experiment with it...
>>>
>>> -anil
>>
>