Floating point numbers have been given a bad rap. They’re mocked, maligned, and feared; the but of every joke, the scapegoat for every rounding error. But this stigma is not deserved. Floats are friends! Friends that have been stuck between a rock and a computationally hard place, and been forced to make some compromises along the way… but friends never the less! In this talk we’ll look at the compromises that were made while designing the floating point standard (IEEE754), how to …