Cross Compilation and Floating Point#

While all modern machines use twos-complement representation for integers, there are a variety of representations for floating point numbers. This means that in a cross-compiler the representation of floating point numbers in the compiled program may be different from that used in the machine doing the compilation.

Because different representation systems may offer different amounts of range and precision, all floating point constants must be represented in the target machine’s format. Therefore, the cross compiler cannot safely use the host machine’s floating point arithmetic; it must emulate the target’s arithmetic. To ensure consistency, GCC always uses emulation to work with floating point values, even when the host and target floating point formats are identical.

The following macros are provided by real.h for the compiler to use. All parts of the compiler which generate or optimize floating-point calculations must use these macros. They may evaluate their operands more than once, so operands must not have side effects.

REAL_VALUE_TYPE#: The C data type to be used to hold a floating point value in the target machine’s format. Typically this is a struct containing an array of HOST_WIDE_INT, but all code should treat it as an opaque quantity.

HOST_WIDE_INT REAL_VALUE_FIX(REAL_VALUE_TYPE x)#: Truncates x to a signed integer, rounding toward zero.

unsigned HOST_WIDE_INT REAL_VALUE_UNSIGNED_FIX(REAL_VALUE_TYPE x)#: Truncates x to an unsigned integer, rounding toward zero. If x is negative, returns zero.

REAL_VALUE_TYPE REAL_VALUE_ATOF(const char *string, machine_mode mode)#: Converts string into a floating point number in the target machine’s representation for mode mode. This routine can handle both decimal and hexadecimal floating point constants, using the syntax defined by the C language for both.

int REAL_VALUE_NEGATIVE(REAL_VALUE_TYPE x)#: Returns 1 if x is negative (including negative zero), 0 otherwise.

int REAL_VALUE_ISINF(REAL_VALUE_TYPE x)#: Determines whether x represents infinity (positive or negative).

int REAL_VALUE_ISNAN(REAL_VALUE_TYPE x)#: Determines whether x represents a ‘NaN’ (not-a-number).

REAL_VALUE_TYPE REAL_VALUE_NEGATE(REAL_VALUE_TYPE x)#: Returns the negative of the floating point value x.

REAL_VALUE_TYPE REAL_VALUE_ABS(REAL_VALUE_TYPE x)#: Returns the absolute value of x.