John Carmack found an interesting 1998 paper by William Kahan and Joseph D. Darcy (PDF): Java’s floating-point arithmetic is blighted by five gratuitous mistakes: Linguistically legislated exact reproducibility is at best mere wishful thinking. Of two traditional policies for mixed precision evaluation, Java chose the worse. Infinities and NaNs unleashed without the protection of floating-point … Continue reading How Java’s Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere