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...so does LLVM, unless you specifically instruct it to do otherwise with -ffast-math. Don't be fooled by the name of this flag, if it were possible to just do math faster without compromising anything, it wouldn't be a flag, it would be the default. It seems that Julia has a flag with the same name but a different behavior. Okay? What's your point exactly?

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@fastmath in Julia is telling LLVM (basically) the same thing. I think the only difference is that Julia doesn't think rsqrt(x)*x with Newton iteration is a good way of computing sqrt

But in this case, -ffast-math actually results in slower math, so the flag is badly named. Naming things is important (and hard). The naive expectation of a flag named -ffast-math is that the math should never be slower, sometimes be faster, and potentially less accurate and/or error prone. The fact that it can also be sometimes slower means the flag really should be named -fdifferent-math or (uncharitably) -funreliable-math.

It’s too bad that it hasn’t acquired the name of an author to describe this alternative functionality more concisely without being judgy (like Nagle’s algorithm). I looked around, and it seems that there isn’t any one designer/author that you could give credit to.

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