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> Hi Marc, the changes to the pythoncore.vcproj Visual-Studio file define > the HAVE_VC_FUNC_FOR_X87 symbol.
Okay, makes sense. I was distracted by the spurious reordering of in the diff for pythoncore.vcproj.
Just to be clear, the intent of the patch is that the FPU state is *always* switched on Windows prior to calling the dtoa.c functions; is that right?
Things to think about:
 - can we avoid *writing* to the x87 / SSE control word if no change is necessary (as is currently done with the gcc code)? We want to avoid unnecessary FPU pipeline flushes.
 - we need to make sure that the patch works on 64-bit. There's a bit of text at:
 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c9676k6h.aspx
 that suggests that in x64 mode, setting the precision is an error.
 - what happens if the x87 and SSE2 control words have different precisions? Does the patch restore both those precisions correctly?
 - in the patch, isn't new387controlword unused?
I'm not sure that this part of the patch can go into the maintenance branches (2.7, 3.2); if this is a new feature (and I think it is, but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise), it can only target 3.3.