Rendering floating-point numbers

Interesting reference material: it seems obvious in retrospect, but it had never occurred to me that the process of rendering a floating-point number into a string was the sort of project people might write papers about.

Here’s something I bet you never think about, and for good reason: how are floating-point numbers rendered as text strings? This is a surprisingly tough problem, but it’s been regarded as essentially solved since about 1990.

References to the “Dragon4″ algorithm, and to a recent improvement, “Grisu3″.

Interesting simple multi-language benchmark

Comparing language performance and memory usage in C and Python, using a simple program to remove duplicate lines from a text file.

Radian’s current feature set ought to be enough to build this test; I wonder how it would stack up.