cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24332731
~~Stolen~~ Cross-posted from here: https://fosstodon.org/@foo/113731569632505985
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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LOL! Man I learned that in college and never used it ever again. I never came across any scenarios in my professional career as a software engineer where knowing this was useful at all outside of our labs/homework.
Anyone got any example where this knowledge became useful?
In game dev it’s pretty common. Lots of stuff is built on floating point and balancing quality and performance, so we can’t just switch to double when things start getting janky as we can’t afford the cost, so instead we actually have to think and work out the limits of 32 bit floats.
So you have to remember how it's represented in the system with how the bits are used? Or you just have to remember some general rules that "if you do that, it'll fuck up."
Well, rules like “all integers can be represented up to 2^24” and “10^-38 is where denormalisation happens” are helpful, but I often have to figure out why I got a dodgy value from first principles, floating point is too complicated to solve every problem with 3 general rules.
I wrote a float from string function once which obviously requires the details (intentionally low quality and limited but faster variant since the standard version was way too slow).