Herbie: Optimize Floating-Point Expressions

I tried the quadratic equation, which is infamous for its loss of precision in numerical computations. The best output was merely a rewrite of the original equation using FMA (I'm not sure if I was using the tool correctly, perhaps it could find more creative solutions given the right inputs). But at least it also found the standard approximation -c/b & -b/a, applicable when the real roots are far from each other (which is the case for many practical problems) [0].

[0] https://web.mit.edu/6.969/www/readings/quadratic-formula.pdf

I tried to compile Herbgrind, a plugin for Valgrind, and failed miserably. Had to do something with the cursed build system.

previous posts:

Herbie: Find and fix floating-point accuracy problems (uwplse.org) 6 months ago | 26 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38451680

Herbie 2.0 Released (uwplse.org) 11 months ago | 0 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543214

Herbie – optimize floating-point expressions for accuracy (github.com/herbie-fp) 2 years ago | 2 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30740880

Herbie: Automatically Improving Floating Point Accuracy (uwplse.org) 4 years ago | 17 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069465

Herbie: Automatically rewrites expressions to minimize floating point error (github.com/uwplse) 8 years ago | 19 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964617

Herbie: Automatically Improving Floating Point Accuracy (uwplse.org) 9 years ago | 3 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9999438

This is great. Thank You.