Posits are a real alternative to floating point numbers [0] proposed by John Gustafson, the discoverer of Gustafson's law [1]. My very limited understanding is

Posits are a real alternative to floating point numbers [0] proposed by John Gustafson, the discoverer of Gustafson's law [1]. My very limited understanding is that at the sort of bitwidths you care about they are not amenable to efficient hardware implementation, unlike IEEE-754 style floats, which is part of the reason why you don't see them implemented widely. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gustafson_(scientist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gustafson_(scientist) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law