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Does the Java floating point implementation still have issues identified by Kahan?

Today I read several works from Kahan and his famous writing against Java. Before I plunged into the JVM specification, did something change from the moment of the initial rant on this front? For example:

  • set rounding mode
  • access to flags
  • getting more accuracy for free
  • ...?

Thanks,

Niko.

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Prof. Kahan's student, Joe Darcy, became the "floating-point king" of the Sun. His blog entry, “All Old New Again” is the starting point for more information on the work he did to fix the problems. There were big improvements.

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I assume that they are still valid since I have not seen big changes in this area since 1998.

However, I’m not sure that they will actually be used, even if they were added today. Many languages ​​support variable precision arithmetic (like Java), which seems to be the best solution for this type of problem. e.g. BigInteger, BigDecimal.

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