Question

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32-bit to 16-bit Floating Point Conversion

How do I convert between 32-bit floats and 16-bit half-precision floats in C?

Answer 1

Since C typically doesn’t have a 16-bit floating point type built-in, I would expect you would either have to

1. Use some super-specific platform “magic”, like a dedicated CPU instruction if available. This will of course not be a C solution, it will likely be inline assembly in the C source. Not portable.
2. Manually extract the required bits into perhaps an unsigned short. This will be portable, but might be a lot slower.

Both of these assume all you want to do is build the value’s representation, you can’t do arithmetic using C’s operators of course.