Built-in support for half-floats
Half-floats (16-bit floating point values with 1-bit sign, 5-bits of exponent, and 10 bits of mantissa) are becoming more and more common in this new era of data-centric programming: Almost all GPUs have native support, and most CPU's are starting to support them natively in their instruction set.
It would be great if GHC can lead the way and have half-floats as a natively supported data-type as well, just like Float and Double.
I'm aware of Edward's http://hackage.haskell.org/package/half package; so that could be a starting point; though we'd eventually want GHC to generate native code. Note that LLVM does support half-floats, so a viable path can be using LLVM when available and software-FFI/implementation otherwise. Eventually the native code generator can add support as well.
Trac metadata
| Trac field | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | 8.6.2 |
| Type | FeatureRequest |
| TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
| Priority | normal |
| Resolution | Unresolved |
| Component | Compiler |
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