toSeconds is sometimes inaccurate

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#20 1 comment 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@liyang is already working on this.

Since Jul 2, 2014.

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This issue has not been assessed yet.

Description

bug wontfix

Currently implemented as:

toSeconds :: (TimeDiff t, Fractional n) => t -> n
toSeconds = (* recip 1000000) . fromIntegral . view microseconds

rather than

toSeconds = (/ 1000000) . fromIntegral . view microseconds

such that

> toSeconds (microseconds # 5 :: DiffTime) :: Double 
4.9999999999999996e-6

even though a more accurate Double representation exists:

> 5 / 1000000 :: Double
5.0e-6

This can result in an error larger than 0.5us when calling toSeconds with durations of greater than microseconds # (2^32 * 1000000) (assuming 64-bit Double with 52 bits of mantissa), which is a little over 136 years. (Not entirely unreasonable; the first discrepancy is at 11us later.)

Won't fix for now as FDIV is significantly slower than FMUL: check the instruction tables PDF. Comment below if this causes any problems.

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