By default, these expand to the regular float type and float safe math macros.
What Jacek worked on during his internship was providing an interval arithmetic facility. In this mode, the float type macro expands to a struct that represents an interval of floats, and each floating point operation becomes a call to a function that operates on, and returns, interval structs. He then implemented a wrapper library that implements each of the floating point interval operations by delegating to the Boost interval arithmetic library. The idea is that for a Csmith float program, one can use a reliable compiler in interval mode to get bounds on the possible values of floating point results, and then check whether results from another compiler are within these bounds. This is useful if one does not expect bit-precise equivalence between compilers but does expect interval containment.
So, to summarise: one only needs Boost if one wants to compile and use Jacek's wrapper library for interval arithmetic.
Jacek could split his pull request into two parts: one that fixes issues related to floats in Csmith, and another that relates to the wrapper library. Given that not everyone would require the wrapper library, perhaps it could be configured to build only if Boost is available? It would also be maintained as a separate project, but I think that since it could well be useful to other folks interested in Csmith there might be a case for adding it to the main code base.
Let me know what you think. A On 14/11/2015 15:08, Eitan Adler wrote:
On 14 November 2015 at 01:53, John Regehr <regehr@cs.utah.edu> wrote: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?General comment, but relevant: when it comes to issues like this please try to optimize for package maintainers. On modern operating systems it should be a very rare event to download software and type make. Installing any piece of software (redis or csmith) ought to be as simple as `pkg install csmith`.