GoKawiilI have a confession to make: floating point scares me.
Half a decade ago I decided that I was going to implement some floating point arithmetic. Back then it seemed approachable enough, after all, floating points are ubiquitous. How hard can it really be ? My experience until that point had been: given enough time and effort is spent bashing my brain against a problem, I can generally figure things out.
This is how I faced the most complete technical defeat of my existence. Through this utter annihilation emerged my present fear of floating point.
After half a decade I decided it was time for a rematch, time to face my dragons!
But this time, I would not simply aim for a surface level understanding, this time I would aim to deeply grasp the floating point representation.
When setting out on this crusade, I believed that there were only 3 types of people who truly understood floating point :
The people writing the spec The math PhDs working on the floating point representation The people building the floating point hardware
Welcome to round 2!
Chapter 1: Descent into madness #
Looking back on it, one of the main reasons behind my past defeat was that I mistook my ability to use floating points for a marker of understanding. And that this freed me from the need to invest the time in studying floating point, as if I was going to pick it up along the way.
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