Recently I discovered that Java converts some very small decimal numbers to double-precision floating-point incorrectly. While investigating that bug, I stumbled upon something very strange: Java’s decimal to floating-point conversion routine, Double.parseDouble(), sometimes returns two different results for the same decimal string. The culprit appears to be just-in-time compilation of Double.parseDouble() into SSE instructions, which exposes an architecture-dependent bug in Java’s conversion algorithm — and another real-world example of a double rounding on underflow error. I’ll describe the problem, and take you through the detective work to find its cause.
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