MicroFloatingPoints

November 17, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

The MicroFloatingPoints package defines the Floatmu parametric type to manipulate IEEE 754 standard-compliant floating-point numbers with a very small size (from 5 bits up to 32 bits).

Example of use

Adding 0.25 and 2.0 in a floating-point format with 1 bit for the sign (implied), 2 bits for the exponent, and 2 bits for the fractional part (3 bits for the whole significand with the hidden bit), and testing whether the result had to be rounded:

julia> using MicroFloatingPoints

julia> Floatmu{2,2}(0.25)+Floatmu{2,2}(2.0)
2.0

julia> inexact()
true

Installation

The package can be installed with the Julia package manager. From the Julia REPL, type ] to enter the Pkg REPL mode and run:

pkg> add MicroFloatingPoints

Or, equivalently, via the Pkg API:

julia> import Pkg; Pkg.add("MicroFloatingPoints")

Optionally, to enable plotting, install either one of PyPlot.jl or PythonPlot.jl as follows.

julia> import Pkg; Pkg.add("PyPlot")

OR

julia> import Pkg; Pkg.add("PythonPlot")

Note that the matplotlib Python package must be available through PyCall or PythonCall. This is usually setup when installing PyPlot.jl or PythonPlot.jl, which are optional (weak) dependencies that provide plotting backends via package extensions.

Documentation

Project status

The package is developed and has been tested on Julia 1.6 through 1.12.