{"action":"opened","issue":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ucb-bar/berkeley-softfloat-3/issues/5","repository_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ucb-bar/berkeley-softfloat-3","labels_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ucb-bar/berkeley-softfloat-3/issues/5/labels{/name}","comments_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ucb-bar/berkeley-softfloat-3/issues/5/comments","events_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ucb-bar/berkeley-softfloat-3/issues/5/events","html_url":"https://github.com/ucb-bar/berkeley-softfloat-3/issues/5","id":246013607,"number":5,"title":"Future direction of SoftFloat and its development model","user":{"login":"stsquad","id":22458,"avatar_url":"https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/22458?v=4","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad","html_url":"https://github.com/stsquad","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/stsquad/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"labels":[],"state":"open","locked":false,"assignee":null,"assignees":[],"milestone":null,"comments":0,"created_at":"2017-07-27T11:45:23Z","updated_at":"2017-07-27T11:45:23Z","closed_at":null,"body":"The [QEMU project](http://www.qemu.org/) makes extensive use of SoftFloat to model floating point instructions. The source in QEMU's tree is based on SoftFloat2a due to later incompatibilities in the licensing. It has also seen a number of additions over time including specialisation for the various architectures we emulate. Perhaps the biggest one being augmenting the API to pass *float_status to the various operations. This needed to be done as the CPUs we emulate often have different FPU contexts so the floating point flags shouldn't interfere with each other.\r\n\r\nAs time has moved on and more recent processor revisions require additional features from later revisions of IEE754 we are faced with a dilemma of how to move forward. We can either keep adding features to our copy of 2a or instead port our code to use 3c and it track its future development. However given our extensive changes this doesn't make sense if our internal copy is going to have to be significantly modified and diverge again from the upstream. So this leads to a couple of questions:\r\n\r\n- What are the development goals of SoftFloat?\r\n  - why was it originally written and who are its target users?\r\n- Is SoftFloat in active development?\r\n  - under [history](http://www.jhauser.us/arithmetic/SoftFloat-3c/doc/SoftFloat-history.html) it is mentioned UC Berkley funded v3. Is this an ongoing commitment or was there a goal in mind?\r\n  - is the project interested in taking patches from the wider community?\r\n- What is SoftFloat's development model?\r\n  - The [homepage](http://www.jhauser.us/arithmetic/SoftFloat.html) just suggests mailing John directly but there is this repository. Is future development now here or is this just a fork for the Berkley team?\r\n"}}
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