Flush denormals to zero. Even their inventor had trouble writing correct code in their presence - see the Appendix to that "what every programmer should know..." paper
Another thing to keep in mind is that CPU processing of denormals tends to be extremely slow - I vaguely recall running into something like a 10x slowdown a decade ago.
For a lot of applications the difference between a denormal and zero is small enough to be irrelevant, so if you expect near-zero values to be common, enabling a denormals-to-zero compiler flag might give you a pretty nice performance boost for free.
cpus that aren't Intel are plenty fast on denormals. Intel is the only one where denormals are 100x slower. (and Intel has fixed that on their new cpus, but only on their e cores)
It's one of several issues with the design of IEEE floats, unfortunately. I wish we could start thinking more seriously about a new design, to complement if not replace IEEE in the long term. Posits are an example https://github.com/andrepd/posit-rust
I didn't know that. Could you provide a more specific reference?
Why is implementing it correctly not performant? For context I have no idea how rounding is typically implemented anyways.
For a lot of applications the difference between a denormal and zero is small enough to be irrelevant, so if you expect near-zero values to be common, enabling a denormals-to-zero compiler flag might give you a pretty nice performance boost for free.