Floating-point questions

Floating-point questions

[Karl Lessard]

Hi all,

I just want to make sure that I understand correctly the behavior of 
floating-points on systems without
FPU.  There is 2 way for doing floating-point operations:

The first is to let the CPU generate exceptions on a FP operation call , 
which are handl e by the kernel that do the job in software,
using integers only.

The second is to build your app using the -msoft-float compilation flag, 
making GCC to convert itself the FP operations
to integer operations, using its own libraries.

Also, I've test the both methods with simple float operations, and I 
figured suprisingly that the first method is a bit
faster (I though the overhead would have been larger than the second one).

Do I miss something? Is there anything I can do to optimize 
significantly float operations?

Thanks a lot,
Karl