On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 01:46:07PM +0200, Kamil Rytarowski wrote: > To be clear, we now thinking only about i386 and amd64. Other OSes push > also systemz machines to this competition.
I have no idea what systemz machines are and why you are limiting the arch coverage for this discussion arbitrarily. We have softfloat support for 128bit in userland, and could probably use that for all architectures, but the downside would be that lots of stupid configure scripts will start picking this up and use it, and users will see a heavy performance degradation. That is why IMO providing the type and support functions is a bad idea unless supported by hardware or forced by ABI. Martin