PPC and X86: Portable printing of IEEE floats
GNU as and the AIX assembler support floating point literals.
SPARC seems to have support too but I cannot test on SPARC.
Curiously, doubleToBytes
is also used in the LLVM backend.
To avoid endianness issues when cross-compiling float and double literals are printed as C-style floating point values. The assembler then takes care of memory layout and endianness.
This was brought up in #18431 (closed) by @hsyl20.