4 ms·
We don't have fast hardware decimals, except on IBM mainframes. So, if you need fast financial calculations which are too complicated for integers (e.g. gasp di
by atemerev 3y ago
We don't have fast hardware decimals, except on IBM mainframes. So, if you need fast financial calculations which are too complicated for integers (e.g. gasp division), you usually use decimally-normalized doubles and do it very very carefully.
This is a sad state of affairs, but nobody was fixing this in the last 30 years, so there's that.
- cubefox 3y agoAre there even any applications where one needs a) decimal precision and b) fast computation? Financial calculations don't need to be fast.
- nvy 3y agoHigh-frequency trading, perhaps. Physics simulations too.
- wtallis 3y agoPhysics simulations are a great example of where there's obviously no need to do arithmetic in decimal rather than binary floating point.
- atemerev 3y agoAlgorithmic trading, of course. High-frequency trading in particular. But any trading, in fact, when you run simulations for thousands of instruments and search among millions of parameters. Or when you implement an exchange, or route orders between exchanges according to their complicated criteria. Or when you do options pricing. Basically, everything in this field.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justeleblanc 3y agoSo something that produces nothing of value to civilization. Gotcha.
- atemerev 3y agoWell, I assume you want to sell your hard-earned stocks of civilization-helping companies sometimes...
- justeleblanc 3y agoNope. I'd rather there not be a thing called a stock market at all.
- nequo 3y agoDo you just plan to save your money in dollar bills hidden inside a pillow until you retire? If you want to invest it in any way, you probably want to avoid floating point numbers for keeping track of it.
- justeleblanc 3y agoI'd prefer living in a world where social security is enough for me not to worry about things like "saving money".
- atemerev 3y ago[flagged]
- epgui 3y agoSo no pensions, sovereign wealth funds, or scholarship funds? And by what mechanism is capital allocated?
- justeleblanc 3y ago
- zwischenzug 3y agoGambling.
- mamcx 3y agoBusiness apps? Like all of them? As matter of fact, business apps are by far the longest portion of the apps. Just considering all spreadsheets, almost all RDBMS, etc alone. Binary Floating-point is what is ACTUALLY niche. And it not look like it just because is the default, similar how in certain niches "0" is "true".
- int_19h 3y agoMost business apps don't do anywhere near enough compute that it matters.
- FpUser 3y agoI would add generating large financial reports, enterprise billing etc. There is a huge business effect between for example 2 hours needed to calculate monthly invoices and 24 hours.
- wtallis 3y agoIs any of that actually bottlenecked by arithmetic rather than pointer chasing?
- syastrov 3y agoProbably more likely inefficient data access patterns, such as N+1 queries, inefficient algorithms, lack of parallelism
- kragen 3y agono, 2 hours of addition on my cellphone at 2 gigahertz, 4 cores, and conservatively 3 additions per core per cycle would be 170 trillion additions nobody needs 170 trillion additions for their nightly invoices
- ibiza 3y agoPower ISA includes decimal floating point, so it's available beyond mainframes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA
- dahjelle 3y agoI’m not qualified to evaluate it, but Douglas Crockford has at least made a proposal: https://www.crockford.com/dec64.html https://www.crockford.com/dec64.html