My last bug report I wrote a small C++ program to put all the values between 0x000 .. 0xfff into a tree structure and then iterate over the tree printing out the values.
I’d have loved if the library author replied with “why don’t you just print out the values directly?”
My point wasn’t that the program in the bug report did not do anything meaningful (duh). My point was that most numerical algorithms, once they hit intermediate underflow in the form of subnormals for a set of inputs, do not proceed to compute a result that is in any way related to their stated purpose (with the notable exception of string conversions). Unless a hard limit on the number of iterations is imposed, most iterative algorithms can also be made to hang by giving them unfortunate inputs. In both cases it is the responsibility of the numerical analyst invoking them to not provide such inputs.
So it seems likely (if not certain) that the bug report in question says, essentially, that a function inside scipy, given certain arguments, returns one sequence of meaningless bits quickly when gevent is not loaded and a different sequence of meaningless bits very slowly when it is. While that is certainly not nice, and I’d accept it as a bug in gevent, it still does not count as a piece of code succeeding at a reasonable task with subnormals but failing without them.
(I do not have any ideological opposition to such code—it would certainly be interesting to see some!)
I’d have loved if the library author replied with “why don’t you just print out the values directly?”