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William Kahan, the father of IEEE floattig point arithmetic and one of the main references on numerical errors, has some bad thing to say about doing floatting
by nestorD 7y ago
William Kahan, the father of IEEE floattig point arithmetic and one of the main references on numerical errors, has some bad thing to say about doing floatting point computations on the JVM : http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
An nd array library could be great for machine learning but it is probably not the place where you want to do numerical simulations.
- walkingolof 7y agoHonest question, how much is this about Java and not the JVM and its from "July 30, 2004", is it even relevant now 15 years later ?
- freeone3000 7y agoEverything except operator overloading also applies to the JVM... But equally well to python. Basically, the complaint is you don't get any of the hardware fp stuff like traps and signals and all of the math is slightly unportable because it gives different answers on different machines, but these are well-known issues.
- nestorD 7y agoThere is also the fact that intermediate operation between floats are done in float precision and not double precision (as would be the case with C). It might be the behaviour one would expect but it can lead to serious degradations of a numerical computation.
- antpls 7y agoThis PDF is not easily readable and it is from 20 years ago. Did the situation evolve ? Is it still relevant ?
- nestorD 7y agoHere is a previous HN thread on the subject : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585828 I believe the main pain points still apply.