F# - How to compare floats

Question

In F#. How to efficiently compare floats for equality that are almost equal? It should work for very large and very small values too. I am thinking of first comparing the Expone

Answer 1

An F# float is just a shorthand for System.Double. That being the case, you can use the BitConverter.DoubleToInt64Bits method to efficiently (and safely!) "cast" an F# float value to int64; this is useful because it avoids allocating a byte[], as John mentioned in his comment. You can get the exponent and significand from that int64 using some simple bitwise operations.

As John said though, you're probably better off with a simple check for relative accuracy. It's likely to be the fastest solution and "close enough" for many use cases (e.g., checking to see if an iterative solver has converged on a solution). If you need a specific amount of accuracy, take a look at NUnit's code -- it has some nice APIs for asserting that values are within a certain percentage or number of ulps of an expected value.