Is floating-point math consistent in C#? Can it be?

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I know of no way to way to make normal floating points deterministic in .net. The JITter is allowed to create code that behaves differently on different platforms(or between different versions of .net). So using normal floats in deterministic .net code is not possible.

The workarounds I considered:

  1. Implement FixedPoint32 in C#. While this is not too hard(I have a half finished implementation) the very small range of values makes it annoying to use. You have to be careful at all times so you neither overflow, nor lose too much precision. In the end I found this not easier than using integers directly.
  2. Implement FixedPoint64 in C#. I found this rather hard to do. For some operations intermediate integers of 128bit would be useful. But .net doesn’t offer such a type.
  3. Implement a custom 32 bit floatingpoint. The lack of a BitScanReverse intrinsic causes a few annoyances when implementing this. But currently I think this is the most promising path.
  4. Use native code for the math operations. Incurs the overhead of a delegate call on every math operation.

I’ve just started a software implementation of 32 bit floating point math. It can do about 70million additions/multiplications per second on my 2.66GHz i3.
https://github.com/CodesInChaos/SoftFloat . Obviously it’s still very incomplete and buggy.

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