std.math ieeeFlags cannot be reliably tested

[smolt]

The compiler can unexpectedly rearrange floating point operations and access to the floating point status flags when optimizing. This means std.math ieeeFlags cannot be reliably checked in optimized code. Consider:

void main()
{
    import std.math;
    static real zero = 0.0;
    real x = 3.5;

    resetIeeeFlags();
    assert(!ieeeFlags.invalid);

    x /= zero;
    x *= zero;
    assert(ieeeFlags.invalid);  // optimizer may moves this before div and mult
    assert(isNaN(x));
}

Here, optimizer moves function call ieeeFlags() before math ops, and invalid is not set as expected. This has been observed with LLVM 3.6 targeting arm and x86-64, and other combinations may be affected to. Right now it is cause a new 2.067 unittest in std.math to fail.

C99 invented "#pragma STDC FENV_ACCESS ON" to prevent optimizer from reordering instructions that affect float environment. See note [2] here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99#Example

clang does not support this pragma and LLVM IR has no way of expressing: https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=10409

This also could be an issue for gdc as this reference says gcc doesn't support pragma FENV_ACCESS: http://wiki.musl-libc.org/wiki/Mathematical_Library#Fenv_and_error_handling

Work around in C is to use volatile vars to force ordering and libm.h has a FORCE_EVAL macro to do that.

[kinke]

This has been largely worked around via the really handy @optStrategy("none") UDA in the meantime. There's still 1-2 disabled std.math tests, IIRC because the UDA cannot be applied to delegate literals.

[Geod24]

LLVM have support for the aforementioned pragma: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/2e204e23911b1f8bd1463535da40c6e48747a138

[ibuclaw]

This change to the unittests should help on that front. https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/8642

Taking the original code example, the tests have now been rewritten to:

void main()
{
    import std.math;
    static real zero = 0.0;
    real x = 3.5;

    resetIeeeFlags();
    assert(!ieeeFlags.invalid);

    x = forceDiv(x, zero);  // pragma(inline, false) T forceDiv(T)
    x = forceMul(x, zero); // pragma(inline, false) T forceMul(T)
    assert(ieeeFlags.invalid);
    assert(isNaN(x));
}