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Pondering Rust's fascination with f32

2026-04-22 19:20:03.197514+02 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Pondering Rust's fascination with f32 types. I remember being concerned about memory usage and floats vs doubles in the late '90s, but in the intervening decades I thought we'd kinda agreed that unless there's lots of them, doubles were faster. Am I just the wrong level of old?

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#Comment Re: made: 2026-04-22 20:25:20.209186+02 by: Mars Saxman [edit history]

I believe the whole SIMD thing swung the pendulum back the other way: you can crunch your data twice as fast when the units are half as wide, because you're executing a single operation on an XMM/YMM/ZMM register either way.

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