Does Java's floating point implementation still have the problems identified by Kahan?

Question

I've read a few papers from Kahan tonight, and his famous rant against Java. Before I dive into the JVM spec, did anything change since the initial rant on this front? For example:

• setting rounding mode
• accessing the flags
• getting more precision for free
• ... ?

Thanks,

Nico.

Answer 1

Prof. Kahan's student, Joe Darcy, became Sun's "floating point czar". His blog entry "Everything Old is New Again", is an entry point for learning more about work he did to correct the problems. There have been great improvements.