The Rust Programming Language — Primitives — Floats and Immutability
In this article, we are going to learn about float primitive type.
Floats are a primitive type in Rust which allow you to deal with numbers and decimals. Take for example below code snippet:
fn main() {
let x = 1.1;
let y = 2.2;
println!("x times y is {}!", x*y);
}The code snippet looks fairly similar to the ones that we have used in string interpolation examples, with an additional steps of generating the result of x times y and also coverting it to the string to substitute the {} for generating the final string output.
Typically, if we go by Maths, we should expect the output of x*y to be 2.42 but the output we get in the console is 2.4200000000000004. This is typically because all programming languages perform mathematical operations for decimals using binary system which is quite faster. Modern hardware, for decimal math, has a lot of overhead and multiple instructions which could take significant hit in performance.
There is also one more thing to note here is that println!() is not actually a function call. It is called a macro in Rust programming language. Any call that ends with ! is a macro. A macro is nothing but a line of code which subsequently get’s expanded into set of instructions which are…
