Wilco (Wilco.Dijkstra.delete@this.ntlworld.com) on April 7, 2014 3:12 am wrote:
>
> x87 is dead because of SSE which finally supports correct IEEE arithmetic. Yes you can still use x87 if
> you like, but it's not widely supported (eg. try using long double in VC++ and see how far you get).
>

In 32-bit Visual C/C++ 'long double' was always equivalent of double. That was set in stone 9-10 years before Pentium4 brought a proper double-precision support to SSE.

I don't know why it happened, but my pet theory suggests that it has everything to do with Dave Cutler's soft spot for Alpha and, respectively, his "hard spot" for x386. He just didn't want x386 WinNT platform to be superior in anything.

Now, back to x87 dead. Visual C is a big part of x86 development world, but not a whole word, not even on Windows.