[Numpy-discussion] Solaris Sparc build broken

[David Cournapeau]

Charles R Harris wrote:
>
> I don't remember how PPC does it's arithmetic with the two doubles,
> but one holds small values that are added to the other double, so I
> don't think it can be just like a double in some circumstances.

That's not how it seems to work on mac os x - when I look at the
generated code for long double, the last 8 bytes were always equal to 0.
I cannot find a definitive reference, but it looks like it is only 16
bytes to respect the mac os x 16 bytes alignment as required by its ABI.

For other OS which run ppc with a different format for long double, I
think we could force long double to be the same as double.
> What's rosetta?

That's the ppc emulator used in mac os x to run old powerpc-only
applications on recent Intel mac. It is not 100 % accurate (a few unit
tests don't pass, mostly related to FPU exceptions), but it works quite
well for testing and is reasonably fast.

David