decimal floating point

[Steve Summit]

Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Dec 2025, Jakub Jelinek via Gcc wrote:
>> The basic DFP support is in libgcc (again, for many years), but
>> intentionally only in libgcc.a and not in libgcc_s.so.1, because it would
>> quadruple the size of .text section of that library and add further
>> more than 2MB in .rodata (current library has < 3KB .rodata)
>
> There is definitely a speed/space trade-off in how much data you use for 
> conversions between binary and decimal FP (the thing that takes a huge 
> amount of data in libbid, I think) - you could store less precomputed data 
> at the expense of needing to do more multiplications at runtime as part of 
> the conversion.

For those interested -- and I accept that the number may be zero :-) --
I've been experimenting with an alternate technique for binary/decimal
conversion.  I think it will deliver good accuracy and adequate
performance, with far less of a data footprint.  (Of course, the
validity of this statement will depend on your definition of
"adequate performance".)

I don't have a benchmarkable patch yet, though.