Messing with Floating Point :: Ryan Baker

Presented at the Core C++ 2024 conference, Tel Aviv

Used in engineering, machine learning, graphics, and more, floating point arithmetic is a cornerstone of modern numerical computing. Despite its widespread application, many developers lack a sufficient understanding of the floating point type and its intricacies. This presentation aims to clarify these concepts.

We will walk through the bitwise representation of floating point values, the IEEE 754 Standard, the nuances of arithmetic operations, and some common sources of floating point error. We'll also look at some practical solutions to common pitfalls in C++. A basic familiarity of binary representation (of integers) will be helpful, but no prior experience with floating point arithmetic is necessary.

Floating point is not necessarily the dry, enigmatic topic that it's often made out to be. To convince you of this, we will also walk through some brilliant floating point algorithms such as float to decimal string and fast inverse square root.

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Ryan Baker

I am an undergraduate computer engineering student at Purdue University, where I focus on numerical computing and software development. I have a passion for elegant low-level algorithms. I am currently writing a competitive C++ chess engine, an arbitrary precision floating point library, as well as conducting statistical analysis on the quality of random number generators. Outside of software, I enjoy woodworking and weightlifting.

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