go - Golang floating point precision float32 vs float64

Question

I wrote a program to demonstrate floating point error in Go:

func main() {
    a := float64(0.2) 
    a += 0.1
    a -= 0.3
    var i int
    for i = 0; a < 1.0; i++ {
        a += a
    }
    fmt.Printf("After %d iterations, a = %e
", i, a)
}

It prints:

After 54 iterations, a = 1.000000e+00

This matches the behaviour of the same program written in C (using the double type)

However, if float32 is used instead, the program gets stuck in an infinite loop! If you modify the C program to use a float instead of a double, it prints

After 27 iterations, a = 1.600000e+00

Why doesn't the Go program have the same output as the C program when using float32?

Answer 1

Waitting for answers