Ahoy there, fellow JavaScript sailors! 🚢 Today, we're setting sail on the treacherous seas of floating-point precision. Grab your life jackets, bec...
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As a JavaScript developer, this will always be a recurring caveat that needs proper consideration, especially for applications needing precise calculations.
Have been using a mix of
BigNumberand.toFixed()for my needs.toFixedworks well if you only need to handle small decimal places, but for ensuring accuracy for numbers with a lot of decimal places,BigNumberdoes the job (so far).Broader awareness of IEEE 754 limitations can be critical when developing and validating functionality.
One piece that is often overlooked is the limited significant digits that can cause confusion when numbers don't behave as expected. The number of significant digits is fixed and relates to the total amount of detail, not how large or small the number is:
Much of the work comes down to understanding the realistic data for your application. If you are processing financial transactions you are unlikely to take an order of one quadrillion dollars less one cent, but if dealing with multiplication you can rapidly exceed the precision limits of the built in number format.
Yep. I've been working on a precise
feels likecalculation that takes data from temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind speed and give me a number — then I discovered that my number was inaccurate because, with this error in JS, and some rather important multiplication and exponents, my number got wacky very quickly.Thankfully, there are JS libraries like
Big.jsandmath.jsto help solve these issues. 😅Great post. I thought the sailor theme was fun.
Awesome! I made some edits to improve the readability of the lists as well.