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For a long time on the most popular platform, Intel 32-bit, double wasn't IEEE754 64-bit float by default. It was 80-bit internally, causing weird discrepancies. A description: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3206101/extended-80-bit-...

(Entertainingly, all this template machinery doesn't seem to detect this issue, making it a bit of a waste of time)

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Pretty sure that's still the case, right?

Not generally: most compilers make use of the SSE instruction set which doesn't have extended precision. Occasionally old versions of gcc on 32-bit machines will still use the old x87 instructions (which do have extended precision), but these are becoming increasingly rare in the wild.

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