> Until I realized what would actually happen if the world started using fixed point: programmers would always set the dynamic range too small, so we'd end up with a world full of programs that were constantly failing because they needed to be run on data larger than the test cases.
Floating point doesn't actually fix this issue. A fun bug I dealt with was a black screen caused by a few pixels having NaN values - which were then picked up by a blur pass which would poison basically the entire back buffer. The original NaNs were caused by divides by near-zero values causing out-of-range results.
You now add precision issues: Multiple coordinate systems are a common hack-around to maintain local precision when using single-precision based physics engines. Stuttering effects when time is represented as "floating point seconds since uptime" when integer wraparound would avoid any problem in the first place. And this is before even adding e.g. half precision or worse floats into the mix.
There's a reason floating point isn't used for a lot of serious banking calculations.
