Implementing an interval computation library for OCaml on x86/AMD64 architectures
Jean‐Marc Alliot, Jean‐Baptiste Gotteland, Charlie Vanaret, Nicolas Durand, David Gianazza · 2012
Abstract. In this paper we present two implementation of interval arithmetics for Ocaml on x86/amd64 architectures. The first one is simply a binding to the classical MPFI/MPFR library. It provides ac-cess to multi-precision floating point arithmetic and multi-precision floating point interval arithmetic. The second implementation has been natively written in assembly language for low-level functions and in ocaml for higher-level functions ans is as fast as classical C or C++ implementations of interval arithmetic. 1 Fundamentals of interval arithmetic Interval arithmetic has been used in computer science and numerical computations for years [5]. Its main goal was to create computing environments where the exact value of a computed result lies with certainty within an interval, which might be paramount for some crit-ical applications. Floating point units (FPU) only work with a fixed size for the mantissa of the operands, and numerical errors are un-