I've seen that set of slides before. But it's quite dense and seems to require (at least for me) Kahan's speech to get all the nuances. As for the horrible flo

I've seen that set of slides before. But it's quite dense and seems to require (at least for me) Kahan's speech to get all the nuances. As for the horrible floating point support, are there other factors than lack of signaling NaNs, being unable to set rounding mode and exception policy, floats using floats for intermediate results? For many purposes such flaws don't seem that bad. Why is Java code unable to use vector instructions? I guess there's something in the Java spec that prevent compilers from using them, but what is it? I think that the 80-bit floats the Intel FPU offers are used in Java by default unless a method is defined as strictfp, but this a different issue.