Converting float to double

Question

How expensive is the conversion of a float to a double? Is it as trivial as an int to long conversion?

EDIT: I'm assuming a platform where where float is 4 bytes and double is 8 bytes

Answer 1

Float to double conversions happen for free on some platforms (PPC, x86 if your compiler/runtime uses the "to hell with what type you told me to use, i'm going to evaluate everything in long double anyway, nyah nyah" evaluation mode).

On an x86 environment where floating-point evaluation is actually done in the specified type using SSE registers, conversions between float and double are about as expensive as a floating-point add or multiply (i.e., unlikely to be a performance consideration unless you're doing a lot of them).

In an embedded environment that lacks hardware floating-point, they can be somewhat costly.

Answer 2

I can't imagine it'd be too much more complex. The big difference between converting int to long and converting float to double is that the int types have two components (sign and value) while floating point numbers have three components (sign, mantissa, and exponent).

IEEE 754 single precision is encoded in 32 bits using 1 bit for the sign, 8 bits for the exponent, and 23 bits for the significand. However, it uses a hidden bit, so the significand is 24 bits (p = 24), even though it is encoded using only 23 bits.

-- David Goldberg, What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

So, converting between float and double is going to keep the same sign bit, set the last 23/24 bits of the float's mantissa to the double's mantissa, and set the last 8 bits of the float's exponent to the double's exponent.

This behavior may even be guaranteed by IEEE 754... I haven't checked it, so I'm not sure.