Such trick looks interesting. But I think for many cases it would be better to use fixed-width arithmetic based on 128-bit integers. Operations for them are muc

Such trick looks interesting. But I think for many cases it would be better to use fixed-width arithmetic based on 128-bit integers. Operations for them are much cheaper if done right (and assuming compilers are smart enough to optimize them). For the Mandelbrot set one don't need huge range, maybe 4 bits of range or so, the remaining 124 bits of precision can increase quality significantly.