Floating Point Numbers in Go: Exploring Rounding Issues and Effective Strategies

The technique employed to store floating point numbers can be the cause of potential issues within your application. In this article, we will explore some solutions from a Go point of view.

Francesco Pastore
9 min readJul 5, 2023

Representing floating point numbers in a computer can be challenging due to their inherent complexity. These numbers consist of two variable parts that can fluctuate without bounds in opposite directions.

Also, the decimal point plays a crucial role in determining the precision and accuracy of the computations. Incorrect handling of the decimal point can lead to significant errors in the results.

Most programming languages adopt the IEEE 754 standard for storing floating point numbers, which is a highly efficient approach. However, it is affected by some limitations and potential rounding problems.

In this article, we will explore the world of floating point numbers through the lens of the Go programming language. We will start with a simple example to understand the issues and then we will look to potential solutions.

pi is a common example of irrational number

A first example

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Francesco Pastore

An engineering student in Milan and a web developer for an IT company. Write about programming and cybersecurity topics.