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by zokier
1256 days ago
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> One thing that pains me about this kind of zoo of problems is that people often have the takeaway, "floating point is full of unknowable, random errors, never use floating point, you will never understand it." > Floating point is amazingly useful! Another thing about floats is they are for most parts actually very predictable. In particular all basic operations should produce bit-exact results to last ulp. Also because they are language independent standard, you generally can get same behavior in different languages and platforms. This makes learning floats properly worthwhile because the knowledge is so widely applicable |
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As long as you are not using a compiler that utilizes x87's extended precision flaots for intermediate calculations, and silently rounding whenever it transfers to memory (That used to be a common issue), and as long as you are not doing dumb stuff with compiler math flags.
Also if you have any code anwhere in your program that relies on correct subnormal handling, then you need to be absolutely sure no code is compiled with `-ffast-math`, including in any dynamically loaded code in your entire program, or your math will break: https://simonbyrne.github.io/notes/fastmath/#flushing_subnor...
And of course if you are doing anything complicated with floating point number, there are entire fields of study about creating numerically stable algorithms, and determining the precision of algorithms with floating point numbers.