float scanner status, upcoming release

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

Hi all,

My recent work on musl has mainly been writing the new floating point
scanning code for strtod, scanf, etc. The existing code in musl is
essentially just a placeholder; its results were seriously inaccurate
in all but the most trivial usage cases. Unfortunately, getting
accurate results, especially if you want them correctly rounded for
the current rounding direction, destination floating point precision,
and denormal corner-cases, is highly non-trivial and involves
high-precision arithmetic.

At this point, the new implementation is essentially done, but lacking
integration with libc; it's just a standalone program for reading
decimal floating point strings and converting them. Integration will
require a bit more work getting the function interface suitable for
use by both *scanf() and strto*()/wcsto*(), along with general
cleanups and implementing the now-missing (but MUCH easier) hex float
support.

I'll keep working on it as time allows, and hope to have it committed
within the next few days. At that point I'm hoping to release 0.8.8,
so please report any other pending issues that should be fixed before
release.

Rich