3 ms·
96-bit, and other non-power-of-two systems are cumbersome and error-prone to work with in C - which is often used when writing firmware for computer hardware.
by DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
96-bit, and other non-power-of-two systems are cumbersome and error-prone to work with in C - which is often used when writing firmware for computer hardware.
The real risks of economic damage caused by bit-fiddling bugs is much greater than the risk of bringing the universe’s thermodynamic heat-death ever so slightly nearer...
- speleding 9y agoI would think it's fairly easy to keep all calculations in C in 128-bit and just mask out the top few bytes when retrieving and storing. You could also argue that >64 bit values will be rare enough that they warrant their own code path if they are encountered as an optimization (perhaps they already do this?).