this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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All numbers in JS are stored as 64-bit floats, so past a certain point, precision starts to degrade.
Well that's how floating point units work.
The following is more a explanation about the principle than a precise description of float values in programming, since working with binary values has its own quirks, especially with values lower than one, but anyways:
Think about a number noted by a base and an exponent, like
1.000.000can be represented as
1*10^6.1.000.001now becomes1,000001*10^6.If you want more precision or bigger numbers maintaining the same precision, you will have to add further and further decimal places and that hits a limit at a certain amount.
So basically you can either get really high numbers in a floating point unit or you can store really precise small numbers. But you cannot achieve both at the same time.