James Gosling: on the Java Road

James Gosling: on the Java Road: "Wednesday July 27, 2005

Transcendental Meditation

I got into a conversation with some folks who've been moving a large sophisticated image processing application to Java. They've been getting great performance numbers, much to the surprise of the C crowd in their shop.

With one exception: code that invokes sin() and cos() heavily is somewhat slower. They asked me why this was happening. I had a pretty good idea, but I checked with Joe Darcy, our local Floating Point God, read the article to see what he had to say"

Warning this article contains Maths. Readers of a nervous disposition should look elsewhere. Exposure for long periods is known to produce side-effects - headaches, nausea, a general feeling of mental inadequacy. Go look at some flashing lights or something.... the probability of having an epileptic fit is 2 pi ^ 7 / 2 times more likely than understanding why this:
1.2246467991473532E-16
differs from this:
1.2246063538223773E-16.

A short but interesting read non-the-less.