6.11 Additional Floating Types

As an extension, GNU C supports additional floating types, __float80 and __float128 to support 80-bit (XFmode) and 128-bit (TFmode) floating types. Support for additional types includes the arithmetic operators: add, subtract, multiply, divide; unary arithmetic operators; relational operators; equality operators; and conversions to and from integer and other floating types. Use a suffix ‘w’ or ‘W’ in a literal constant of type __float80 or type __ibm128. Use a suffix ‘q’ or ‘Q’ for _float128.

On the i386, x86_64, IA-64, and HP-UX targets, you can declare complex types using the corresponding internal complex type, XCmode for __float80 type and TCmode for __float128 type:

typedef _Complex float __attribute__((mode(TC))) _Complex128;
typedef _Complex float __attribute__((mode(XC))) _Complex80;

In order to use __float128 and __ibm128 on PowerPC Linux systems, you must use the -mfloat128. It is expected in future versions of GCC that __float128 will be enabled automatically. In addition, there are currently problems in using the complex __float128 type. When these problems are fixed, you would use the following syntax to declare _Complex128 to be a complex __float128 type:

On the PowerPC Linux VSX targets, you can declare complex types using the corresponding internal complex type, KCmode for __float128 type and ICmode for __ibm128 type:

typedef _Complex float __attribute__((mode(KC))) _Complex_float128;
typedef _Complex float __attribute__((mode(IC))) _Complex_ibm128;

Not all targets support additional floating-point types. __float80 and __float128 types are supported on x86 and IA-64 targets. The __float128 type is supported on hppa HP-UX. The __float128 type is supported on PowerPC 64-bit Linux systems by default if the vector scalar instruction set (VSX) is enabled.

On the PowerPC, __ibm128 provides access to the IBM extended double format, and it is intended to be used by the library functions that handle conversions if/when long double is changed to be IEEE 128-bit floating point.