Equality test on floating-point values — CodeQL query help documentation

ID: cpp/equality-on-floats
Kind: problem
Security severity: 
Severity: recommendation
Precision: high
Tags:
   - reliability
   - correctness
Query suites:
   - cpp-security-and-quality.qls

Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository

This rule finds comparisons using the equals (==) operator on floating point values. Such comparisons can yield unexpected results due to conversion or rounding errors. Pay particular attention if you are dealing with very large or very small floating point values as rounding errors will be more prominent when using such values.

Recommendation¶

Floating point numbers should be considered equal if their difference is within an appropriate margin of error.

Example¶

//wrong: could evaluate to 0 (false) due to rounding errors
23.42f == 23.42

//wrong: could evaluate to 1 (true) due to rounding errors
1000000000.0f == 1000000001.0f

//correct: use a margin of error to check equality
fabs(f1 - f2) < EPSILON

References¶

D. Goldberg, What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 23, Issue 1, March 1991 (available online).