Is it good practice to use float instead of double?

[TheKingElessar]

Minecraft is written using float instead of double, and I assume it's to speed up calculations. Do I need to worry about that, or only if my mod does a ton of calculations? Are modern computers good enough that it doesn't matter?

[Draco18s]

Double are double-size floats. Do you actually need that much precision?

[DavidM]

Depends on how much precision you need.

[TheKingElessar]

9 hours ago, Draco18s said:

Double are double-size floats. Do you actually need that much precision?

 

2 hours ago, DavidM said:

Depends on how much precision you need.

So really, I should just use floats in most cases. I'm not super experienced in Java, and everything I found online suggested that you should use doubles by default and floats only in really intensive programs.

[TheKingElessar]

7 hours ago, diesieben07 said:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Stuff like this matters in a program which maxes out your CPU with just maths calculations. It is very hard to actually achieve that nowadays since most of the time you need to wait for the CPU to access memory more time than you are actually doing stuff (depending on what you're doing).

 

So: Unless you have a performance bottleneck, code how it makes sense and do not try to code "for performance".

Okay, thank you!