You can use the -C switches in rustc to enable and disable hardware features such as FP and SIMD.
Hm, I bet there's a flag to disable SIMD entirely (not really important here), and maybe even enable softfp if you use any floats in your code (or libraries, by extension). That'd be interesting to hack in, if it's not already there.
I've written C almost every day at work for ~7 years, and I have maybe written the keyword 'float' half a dozen times.
I do embedded and systems development - you never need floating point in that sort of environment. It's only when you get into application domains that you need it.
Re:Re: C as used/implemented in practice
by stephencanon on Tuesday July 14, 2015 @07:42AM
(#9884101)
There are a number of architectures where you leave half of the performance of little things like memset and memcpy on the table without SIMD.
as a footnote: everytime in my career that someone has said "you never need floating point in X [kernel/network stack/some embedded thing/boot/whatever]," they've come back within a year to ask for my help with floating point library routines for X. So now you've cursed yourself =)
As an embedded developer let me say that the Cortex M4s with FPUs are worth their weight in gold for saving me from debugging fixed point libraries.
Re:Re: C as used/implemented in practice
by GFK_of_xmaspast on Tuesday July 14, 2015 @10:00PM
(#9889297)
I never ever ever want to write fixed point numerics again.
It'd definitely be tricky to use Rust for kernel drivers, but still so tempting!