Quite. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to check the issue tracker before blogging and I don't think Andrew's response was at all problematic.

I'd say the only issue what the "too dumb, but whatever" comment.

That should have been removed and it would have been totally reasonable.

Edit: Oh actually, the author has another blog post titled "I'm too dumb for Zig ...". With that context, it makes sense and I agree it's a reasonable response. I'm sure other readers like me didn't know that context though.

Exactly.

It is a standard thing. It's called floating point.

Surely that's just normal floating point but missing e.g. normalisation? Floating point is literally an int exponent and an int mantissa. Except real floating point adjusts the exponent to avoid integer overflow in the mantissa - which is where rounding happens.

In DPA the mantissa just overflows (silently in the C implementation) and then what?

He increased the size of a float from 4 bytes to 9 bytes, so it is more accurate; then claims that it is so much better. If he did the same implementation, but in 4 bytes; and it was more accurate. Then ... maybe this would be "revolutionary" (to quote TFA).

Probably exactly that - relatively few big ticket customers.

I haven’t followed the link - but why not put it all in one place?

Wait until you see subversion :)

Two steps forward one step back. So it goes.