Intel 8087, which has introduced in 1980 the 80-bit extended floating point format, could store and load 80-bit numbers, avoiding any alterations caused by conversions to less precise formats.

To be able to use the corresponding 8087 instructions, "long double" has been added to the C language, so to avoid extra roundings one had to use "long double" variables and one had to also be careful so that intermediate values used for the computing of an expression will not be spilled into the memory as "double".

However this became broken in some newer C compilers, where due to the deprecation of the x87 ISA "long double" was made synonymous to "double". Some better C compilers have chosen to implement "long double" as quadruple-precision instead of extended precision, which ensures that no precision is lost, but which may be slow on most computers, where no hardware support for FP128 exists.