@thestinger filed #9987, and I thought we should get the ball rolling on documenting and testing IEEE 754-2008 compliance for Rust on non-embedded platforms.

I don't think that there isn't any formal decision that we should implement IEEE 754-2008 but it would really make sense for many applications of Rust.

• Scientific applications
• Games with synchronized or reproducible simulations (multiplayer, recordings)
• JS interpreters
• Anything that needs to be portable

The (binary part of the) standard covers

• Floating-point data format (for interchange and for computation)
• Basic operations (add, sub, mul, div, fma, sqrt, compare, &c.)
• Integer to floating-point conversion
• Floating-point to floating-point conversion
• Floating-point to string conversion
• Floating-point exceptions and handling (NaNs, exceptions, flags, &c.)

So all of this would need tests, and documentation. And my plan is to compile a suite of tests by slowly going through the standard page-by-page and write the basic conformance tests, then do another (even slower pass) that compiles another list of accuracy tests.

@bjz, @thestinger, @pcwalton, @catamorphism, @graydon and anyone interested: Any inputs on this? Is it a good idea at this point in time?