> In the meantime, though, alternative rounding methods are missing, and those can be quite important for both scientific and business computations. My inexper

> In the meantime, though, alternative rounding methods are missing, and those can be quite important for both scientific and business computations. My inexpert understanding is that modifying rounding modes is super niche and poorly supported by most things, so this doesn't strike me as much of a problem. A saner replacement to rounding mode flags would just be to offer different operations for those rare cases they are wanted. > Dealing with that efficiently in SW is difficult, and more so in HW. Not really; you never really need to normalize values and not doing so makes basically everything other than comparisons cheaper. I don't see how normalizing around every arithmetic operation would make the hardware any simpler. > if it can be "undoubtedly improved with effort", why hasn't it been done in several years? Because this is one guy's project and it hasn't seen much (any?) use.