The non-portability of long double is just bonkers, though. Floating point is super-tricky to get right at all levels, and programmers shouldn't be constantly surprised, and often infuriated, when their compiler introduces crazy amounts of nondeterminism by "helpfully" utilizing 80-bits underneath.
I am actually pretty OK with just having an 80-bit float type in the language, as long as it is always 80 bits, and no 64-bit floats get silently promoted. But C didn't have that because it's not what x87 does the fastest. C just has whatever crap is the fastest. I hate that! I imagine that you did a better job of it in D.
In designing WebAssembly we were very careful to go for as much determinism as possible and stick closely to IEEE 754. There were loud voices calling for nondeterminism (even pushing for the default to be nondeterminism as to whether FTZ mode was enabled!) but in the end the portability considerations won out. I was very heavily on the determinism side.
I am actually pretty OK with just having an 80-bit float type in the language, as long as it is always 80 bits, and no 64-bit floats get silently promoted. But C didn't have that because it's not what x87 does the fastest. C just has whatever crap is the fastest. I hate that! I imagine that you did a better job of it in D.
In designing WebAssembly we were very careful to go for as much determinism as possible and stick closely to IEEE 754. There were loud voices calling for nondeterminism (even pushing for the default to be nondeterminism as to whether FTZ mode was enabled!) but in the end the portability considerations won out. I was very heavily on the determinism side.