Bug in gmp/mpfr/mpc, never ending ctan computation

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2018-11-19 15:26:00 +0100, Richard Biener wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2018, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > AFAIK, GCC already changes the exponent range to the binary64 one
> > (the lack of subnormals is not an issue, because in case of underflow,
> > GCC ignores the computations done with MPFR).
> 
> GCC does ignore results in case of overflow or underflow but it
> doesn't currently limit mpfrs exponent range.  Or rather most
> languages don't - I do see mpfr_set_e{min,max} calls being
> done in the Fortran frontend only, but only temporarily and
> seemingly only to call mpfr_subnormalize.

Thanks for the clarification. FYI, mpfr_subnormalize was added
for gfortran.

> > But for its internal computations, I assume that mpc extends the
> > exponent range (if it didn't you would have the same kind of problem,
> > but much more often). Here it seems that the issue is that the maximum
> > supported exponent range is not large enough for the chosen algorithm
> > (which may not be the right one for this kind of input).
> 
> It happens that limiting the range makes the CPOW computation fast.

Yes, because for some functions, underflow or overflow can be detected
before the actual computation.

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