
(.NET) Introducing the Half Type - sk0g
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-the-half-type
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rspeele
Not to deny that this has a legitimate use in graphics and stuff I don't know
about...

But I suspect I will see this misused more often than used correctly, when
penny-wise and pound-foolish programmers feel, absent any performance or
memory issue, that they don't "need" a float or double. Kind of like how when
people are new to programming they often reach for uints when they "don't need
negative numbers" and then get surprised-pikachu-face when their sanity checks
for (x - y >= 0) are always true.

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fanf2
There are some interesting compatibility issues around 16 bit floating point
types. As well as the IEEE layout (5 exponent, 10 mantissa) there’s bfloat16
which has the same range as 32 bit float (8 exponent) but less precision (7
mantissa) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-
point_format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-point_format)

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amir734jj
What would the underlining CLR type be?

I think they could have spent the time developing more interesting features
(maybe borrow some functional concepts from F# and Haskell) rather than this

~~~
pjmlp
This is the kind of stuff that helps to stay in .NET instead of having to get
hold of C++.

I am glad they introduced it, just would like to have had a C# type alias to
go alongside it.

