Background

Architectures using FMA optimization yield slightly different results so we cannot assume floating point values will be precisely the same across different architectures. https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang/pull/899#issuecomment-1244506390

Change

The solution in this change is to check "abs(a-b) < tolerance" instead of comparing the exact values. This will give us confidence that the histogram buckets are near identical.

Testing

I have not tested this change on one of the previously failing architectures. Help from someone with access to one of these architectures would be appreciated.

There are better ways of a tolerant comparison. We already have https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/main/promql/test.go#L637 in the Prometheus code base. Perhaps that's easy enough to just copy over here.

Or depend on https://github.com/beorn7/floats :o)

Or depend on https://github.com/beorn7/floats :o)

I would prefer not to have to package yet another tiny dependency to make this build on Debian (and derivatives), so I would advocate just copying that function.

Or use something like https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/stretchr/testify/assert?utm_source=godoc#InDeltaSlice

Yeah, the dependency was meant as a joke. I think the technique implemented in https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/main/promql/test.go#L637 (or in a slightly more general form in https://github.com/beorn7/floats ) works better that the approach in testify. And yes, I would propose to just copy that piece of code, maybe to the already existing prometheus/internal package.

Sounds like there's consensus on avoiding the extra dependency. Reminds me of that go proverb, "a little copying is better than a little dependency".

I copied the contents of https://github.com/beorn7/floats to the prometheus/internal package. I made a few small changes.

• I renamed "ε" to "epsilon". I feel like this improves readability for non-math people slightly. I can switch back to the original variable name if people want.
• I modified the comment to reference the original repo.
• I added variants which operate on slices of floats.

Couple points I anticipate there may be disagreement about. Calling these out.

• I haven't copied over the tests. Seems like vendoring doesn't usually grab the tests, but this is a slightly different situation.
• I copied over the float32 variant of things, even though we don't use it. Let me know if I should remove those.

I renamed "ε" to "epsilon".

I love the ε, but I am well aware that I'm a small minority here. (Insert lament about decline of classical education…)

I copied over the float32 variant of things.

I think it is overwhelmingly likely that we'll never use the float32 here. I would prefer to remove this variant. It's easy to add later should we really need it, thanks to the reference back to the source repo.

All other points you made seem fine to me.

Thanks for your contribution and your patience.

You're welcome. I appreciate your feedback.

• Removed the float32 variants. I bet you're right that this will never be used.
• Moved the function to a new "almost_equal.go" file. I didn't realize the difflib file was a fork of a vendored dependency. Makes sense to not mix those. More properly put the copyright from the original repo at the top of the new file.