Re: [csmith-dev] Floating-point support in csmith

[John Regehr <regehr@cs.utah.edu>]

I guess the real question is whether Jacek's extension is something that 
is generally useful to a large fraction of Csmith users.  If so, then 
taking on a big dependency would be worth it, otherwise not.  If we can 
make the boost dependency optional and the code isn't too invasive then 
of course we can have the best of both worlds.

In general the conflict here is between research software, which tends 
to accumulate a lot of bits and pieces and weirdnesses, and production 
software that we try to keep streamlined and clean.  As an example of 
the latter, if anyone has installed Redis, you've seen what an 
exceptionally clean piece of production-grade open source software looks 
like: you just download it and type "make" and this always works.

Ally and Jacek, I wonder if you could comment a bit on the general 
usefulness of this extension?  Has it been working well for you and is 
it something that a lot of Csmith users would appreciate?

Overall I think that moving Csmith forward to attack new domains like FP 
and C++ is what we should be doing, but we don't want to make Csmith a 
pain for existing users.

Offtopic, it would be great if we could get C++ generation fixed. 
Csmith in C++ mode is fairly often not compilable C++98 and is very 
often not compilable C++11.  And while Csmith may never generate things 
like class hierarchies, it could easily be extended to generate some 
parts of C++.

John