Deprecate Double.MIN_VALUE?

[Joseph D. Darcy]

There is a policy for managing deprecations:

https://openjdk.org/jeps/277

Most the incompatible step, actually removing the declaration in 
question, if it occurs at all, would only occur after a warning period.

HTH,

-Joe

On 12/2/2024 6:24 PM, David Alayachew wrote:
>
> As a data point of one, we use all of the abovementioned constants 
> regularly for my day job. In total, we have maybe a couple thousand 
> instances of that constant being referenced. Ripping out wouldn't be 
> too painful as long as I was told exactly what the replacements were, 
> but I wouldn't be thrilled with it.
>
> Also, wouldn't this qualify as a backwards-incompatible change?
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2024, 8:32 PM Joseph D. Darcy <joe.darcy at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>     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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://guava.dev/releases/snapshot-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/primitives/Doubles.html__;!!ACWV5N9M2RV99hQ!PaT7OCGf7CncxF09sKLO4p39KkraAtzbBbvnOR8O8r2x6Z0e1zru8BqG9LGItQtyxAQkQc8A12DanwunC_ZxkNGO$> 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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