Make C floating point literals float (rather than double)
CGccFloating PointLiteralsC Problem Overview
It is well known that in C, floating point literals (e.g. 1.23) have type double. As a consequence, any calculation that involves them is promoted to double.
I'm working on an embedded real-time system that has a floating point unit that supports only single precision (float) numbers. All my variables are float, and this precision is sufficient. I don't need (nor can afford) double at all. But every time something like
if (x < 2.5) ...
is written, disaster happens: the slowdown can be up to two orders of magnitude. Of course, the direct answer is to write
if (x < 2.5f) ...
but this is so easy to miss (and difficult to detect until too late), especially when a 'configuration' value is #define'd in a separate file by a less disciplined (or just new) developer.
So, is there a way to force the compiler to treat all (floating point) literals as float, as if with suffix f? Even if it's against the specs, I don't care. Or any other solutions? The compiler is gcc, by the way.
C Solutions
Solution 1 - C
-fsingle-precision-constant flag can be used. It causes floating-point constants to be loaded in single precision even when this is not exact.
Note- This will also use single precision constants in operations on double precision variables.
Solution 2 - C
Use warnings instead: -Wdouble-promotion warns about implicit float to double promotion, as in your example. -Wfloat-conversion will warn about cases where you may still be assigning doubles to floats.
This is a better solution than simply forcing double values to the nearest float value. Your floating-point code is still compliant, and you won't get any nasty surprises if a double value holds a positive value, say, less than FLT_DENORM_MIN (assuming IEEE-754) or greater than FLT_MAX.
Solution 3 - C
You can cast the defined constants to (float) wherever they are used, the optimizer should do its job. This is a portable solution.
#define LIMIT 2.5
if (x < (float)LIMIT) ...
Solution 4 - C
The -Wunsuffixed-float-constants flag could be used too, maybe combined with some of the other options in the accepted answer above. However, this probably won't catch unsuffixed constants in system headers. Would need to use -Wsystem-headers to catch those too. Could generate a lot of warnings...