[nophilosoraptor]

Floats are like 16-bit shorts. Useless.

There is little performance advantage to using a 32-bit float. Their precision is low enough that you can't do anything useful without risking the correctness of your program.

They are, like shorts, an artefact of the past. Unlike shorts, their limitations are not within the intuition of the average programmer, which leads to widespread abuse and bugs.

Kill them before it's too late.

[dbaupp]

Floats (and shorts) have a significant performance advantage, when they're appropriate. For example, you can fit 2x as many floats into cache compare to a double and good cache behaviour is really important these days, it's one of the reasons languages like C/C++/Rust with good control over memory layout can be very fast. Also, you can operate on 2x as many floats with vectorised instructions; again, SIMD is important these days, especially for things like games (where the precision of a float is fine).

[yaantc]

This is too brutal, you have to consider the application domain. For physics simulations I would agree with you. For signal processing or graphics applications float is usually perfectly fine (and even overkill for many DSP applications).

People mentioned the cache efficiency gain with floats, and that is already relevant to rust. If in the future maybe rust could be used for GPGPU, then the difference between float and double often becomes even more dramatic. You definitely want to keep float support for this.

[kibwen]

Packets for networked multiplayer games are another place where half-precision floats are acceptable: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkMennell/20140929/226628/M...

(Though it must be said that Rust doesn't actually have a 16-bit float type at all.)

[acqq]

You are wrong. Ever played 60 fps games on smaller devices? They would not be possible without floats.