Deprecate Double.MIN_VALUE?

[Joseph D. Darcy]

Hmm. I understand the motivation here and the asymmetry with the 
integral types, but on the whole I don't think deprecating {Float, 
Double}.MIN_VALUE and recommending use of a differently-named field with 
the same value would be a net improvement.

-Joe

On 12/2/2024 3:17 PM, Éamonn McManus wrote:
> At Google, we've had several issues over the years relating to 
> Double.MIN_VALUE. People have not unreasonably supposed that 
> Double.MIN_VALUE has the same relationship to Double.MAX_VALUE as 
> Integer.MIN_VALUE has to Integer.MAX_VALUE. So they think that 
> Double.MIN_VALUE is the (finite) negative number of largest magnitude, 
> rather than the positive number of smallest magnitude. We're currently 
> thinking of adding a constant MIN_POSITIVE_VALUE to Guava's Doubles 
> <https://guava.dev/releases/snapshot-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/primitives/Doubles.html> class 
> and having static analysis that suggests using that instead of 
> Double.MIN_VALUE, if that is indeed what you meant, or of course using 
> -Double.MAX_VALUE if *that* is what you meant.
>
> A few JDK and JavaFX bugs show that Google engineers are not the only 
> ones to be confused by this:
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-4218647
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8092698
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8156186
>
> So we also wonder if it would make sense to deprecate Double.MIN_VALUE 
> itself and introduce Double.MIN_POSITIVE_VALUE with the same meaning. 
> Obviously the same thing would apply to Float.
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