RFC: fp printing speedup patch

[Paolo Carlini]

Hi Jerry. I'm just back and still trying to catch up...

Anyway, I have already printed the patch and was hoping to return
to you tomorrow or at most on monday.

Some things I can tell you immediately:

    1- For something so delicate (it affects the output of *most*
       programs!) we definitely must be *very* careful! You should
       post  *many* details about the tests you have done, perhaps
       many actual testcases too, for instance something like a loop
       generating random floats and comparing the output of the
       library to that of plain "C" printfs (using strings, of course
       for that).

    2- Some more numbers about performance: for sure it's a big
       improvement (thanks again) but which is still the gap wrt v2
       for some interesting examples (big number of digits/small
       number of digits)

    3- Due to 1-, above, I (we) would appreciate if you could outline
       a bit the algorithms used, the role of the dtoa thing, and so on.

If you want, I have time to help soon for 1- and also, I hope, for the
various configury issues, but I have to really allocate some time to
this in the next days.

More comments soon...

Paolo.

P.S. Later on, we should of course deal with the other uses of
     __convert_from_v, since the final goal is removing it completely.