[dajoh]

What you're describing is called fixed point arithmetic, a super cool technique I wish more programmers knew about.

Proper finance related code should use it, but in my experience in that industry it doesn't seem very common unless you're running mainframes.

Funnily enough, I've seen a lot more fixed point arithmetic in software rasterizers than anywhere else. FreeType, GDI, WPF, WARP (D3D11 reference rasterizer) all use it heavily.

[kccqzy]

I have worked on firmware that has plenty of fixed point arithmetic. The firmware usually runs on processors without hardware floating point units. For example certain Tesla ECUs use 32-bit integers where they divide it into four bits of integer part and 28 bits of fractional part. So values are scaled by 2^28.

[phkahler]

>> The firmware usually runs on processors without hardware floating point units.

I'm working on control code one an ARM cortex-M4f. I wrote it all in fixed point because I don't trust an FPU to be faster, and I also like to have a 32bit accumulator instead of 24bit. I recently converted it all to floating point since we have the M4f part (f indicate FPU), and it's a little slower now. I did get to remove some limit checking since I can rely on the calculations being inside the limits but it's still a little slower than my fixed point implementation.

[aatd86]

What do they use? Not float I hope. Plus given that some currencies have different precisions... Don't tell me it's rounding errors over trillion monies?! :o)

[Maxatar]

As I indicate in another post, I work in finance and I use binary floats. So do a lot of others who work in the industry. I sympathize with people who think that IEEE floating points are some weird or error prone representation and that fixed point arithmetic solves every problem, but in my professional experience that isn't true and systems that start by using fixed point arithmetic eventually end up making a half-assed error prone and slow version of floating point arithmetic as soon as they need to handle more sophisticated use cases like handling multiple currencies, doing calculations involving percentages such as interest rates, etc etc...

The IEEE 754 floating point standard is a very well thought out standard that is suitable for representing money as-is. If you have requirements such as compliance/legal/regulatory needs that mandate a minimum precision, then you can either opt to use decimal floating point or use binary floating point where you adjust the decimal place up to whatever legally required precision you are required to handle.

For example the common complaint about binary floating point is that $1.10 can't be represented exactly so you should instead use a fixed integer representation in terms of cents and represent it as 110. But if your requirement is to be able to represent values exactly to the penny, then you can simply do the same thing but using a floating point to represent cents and represent $1.10 as the floating point 110.0. The fixed integer representation conveys almost no benefit over the floating point representation, and once you need to work with and mix currencies that are significantly out of proportion to one another, you begin to really appreciate the nuances and work that went into IEEE 754 for taking into account a great deal of corner cases that a fixed integer representation will absolutely and spectacularly fail to handle.

[fluoridation]

The industry standard in finance is decimal floating point. C# for example has 'decimal', with 128 bits of precision.

On occasion I've seen people who didn't know any better use floats. One time I had to fix errors of single satoshis in a customer's database because their developer used 1.0 to represent 1 BTC.

[EGreg]

Smart contracts on EVM and other blockchains all use fixed point, for the simple reason that all machines have to get exactly the same result.

[myst]

Every half-competent software engineer knows about fixed point arithmetic, my friend.

[phkahler]

>> Every half-competent software engineer...

You meant 8192/16384 right? I like q14.