> Currency, taxes, rebates, etc. handling is NEVER done with floating point.
Nonsense. I’ve seen real banking code at reputable banks that uses floats.
> Whatever you do with money you need predictable, reproducible results.
Floats aren’t random. They’re perfectly deterministic, predictable and reproducible. If you do the same operation in two places you get the same result.
I write real banking code. There is definitely a banking code that uses floats, e.g. valuation of financial instruments. The parent comment talks about software that does transactions and “simpler” calculations, like taxes and fees etc.
When people talk about non-determinism of floating point, what they usually mean is non-associativity, that is (x+y)+z may not be exactly equal to x+(y+z).
> When people talk about non-determinism of floating point, what they usually mean is non-associativity, that is (x+y)+z may not be exactly equal to x+(y+z).
Every single time you run those two statements, you’ll get the same result. Yes they're non-associative. But that's specified and documented. That's not the same thing as non-deterministic in any way.
The same code might be optimised in different ways by different compilers, though (or the same compiler with different flags). This might lead to different results for the same code. In that sense, it's non-deterministic.
What is and what is not optimization and what changes are allowed or not depends on the application.
MP3 is an optimization of WAV, yet it changes the result.
Some applications are ok with reducing precision of calculations because they are not sensitive enough to small inaccuracies or they take effort to control inaccuarcies.
For example, graphics applications are typically heavy in FP calculations and yet they tend to not care much about precision and much more about performance. For those applications reducing accuracy for slight performance increase is likely win.
> Floats aren’t random. They’re perfectly deterministic, predictable and reproducible. If you do the same operation in two places you get the same result.
That's not exactly true in real hardware, or at least it wasn't until ~10 years ago. With the x87 FPU, internal precision was 80 bits, while the x86 registers were at most 64 bits. So, depending on the way the program would transfer data between the CPU and FPU your could get different results. It is very likely that different compilers and different optimization decisions could change the way these operations were implemented, so you would get slight differences between different versions of the software.
There are/were also several global FP flags that could get changed by other programs running on the same CPU/FPU that could impact the result of calculations. So, if you want 100% reproducible FP, you would have to either audit all software running on the same machine to ensure it doesn't touch those flags, or set the flags yourself for every FP calculation in your your program.
It's not false - strictfp mandates deterministic FP. If you use that your program will always run all floating point calculations in exactly the same way, full stop.
Secondly, on mainstream implementations, strictfp is already documented the same as default! They're planning to remove it anyway as it's a no-op in almost all cases.
> It's not false - strictfp mandates deterministic FP. If you use that your program will always run all floating point calculations in exactly the same way, full stop.
If you use it. Which is not the default. Your original claim remains false.
It does not matter. When you are doing accounting you are supposed to be able to sum large collections of numbers and get the same result regardless of the order.
That's something FP does not provide and it makes it completely unusable for accounting.
It seems you have no idea what double-side accounting is.
Each operation is accounted on two opposite sides of various account in a way that always keeps sides balanced (ie. they must sum up to the same value).
When you go to your bank account, for example, you have various sums on both sides of your account. Yet when you sum them up they MUST agree or you will be crying blood and suing your bank.
True, that's a good point. I was thinking of C & C++, but you're right, newer languages do a much better job of specifying and controlling this behavior.
It's not about IEEE754, it's about the precision that the FP co-processor offers. The results you get are correct per IEEE754, it's just that they may have even less error than required by IEEE754 in some cases. But, this is enough to make the results non-deterministic between different compilation options.
Also, changes applied to the FP co-processor by other processes on the machine could impact your process, regardless of your own compilation settings.
That's ancient history. Compilers don't use that instruction set any more in normal operation.
GCC, Java, LLVM, etc, will normally emit SSE2 in order to be standards compliant. They will only relax this if you tell them to, then it's your problem.
Yes, I was explicitly talking about the x87, and did mention that it has stopped being relevant for at least 10 years.
I believe there is still quite a bit of cautionary discussion of floating point numbers that was written in the age of the x87, so it's important to understand that people were not just misunderstanding IEEE754, even though their concerns are no longer applicable to modern hardware.
I did not say floats are random. But when you do accounting you need to be able to sum large sets of numbers and compare results with another sum of different numbers and the sum must match. This just does not work with FP.
Poor souls that use FP for accounting are scourge of the industry and source of jokes.
That's what I used to think, then I met these banking types, and they told me 'no we understand their semantics and we use them correctly and we know it is safe for our programs.' These teams have compiler experts on them - they aren't ignorant.
I started working on accounting software in 2002 and right now work for Citi. Compiler experts in accounting? If you are doing HFT you are not doing accounting. Accounting is what happens later when all those transactions need to actually be accounted for and balance calculated
Nonsense. I’ve seen real banking code at reputable banks that uses floats.
> Whatever you do with money you need predictable, reproducible results.
Floats aren’t random. They’re perfectly deterministic, predictable and reproducible. If you do the same operation in two places you get the same result.