Deprecate Double.MIN_VALUE?

[Kevin Bourrillion]

The team isn't unanimous about this yet, but I think it's worth considering fully. I've filed https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8346033 and gave my analysis of the situation there. I'll try to nudge it to some resolution - thanks for raising it!


> On Mon Dec 2 23:17:12 UTC 2024, Éamonn McManus emcmanus at google.com 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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