Floating-point precision error with Ruby

One of my tests was faiing and it turned out this was caused by a floating-point precision error. The functionality in question was a "Load more" button with pagination which loads records from the database and the front-end displays them.

Ruby and JavaScript were passing around a parameter which was only used as part of the SQL queries. Now the problem is that JavaScript doesn't have a Time class and the parameter was passed as string, then converted back to Time in Ruby. The problem comes from the intermediate conversion to float which was used.

Here's a little code snippet to demonstrate the problem:

irb(main):068:0* now = Time.now
=> 2016-03-08 10:54:26 +0200
irb(main):069:0> 
irb(main):070:0* Time.at(now) == now
=> true
irb(main):071:0> 
irb(main):072:0* Time.at(now.to_f) == now
=> false
irb(main):073:0> 
irb(main):074:0* now.to_f
=> 1457427266.7206197
irb(main):075:0> 
irb(main):076:0* now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%9N')
=> "2016-03-08 10:54:26.720619705"
irb(main):077:0> 
irb(main):079:0* Time.at(now.to_f).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%9N')
=> "2016-03-08 10:54:26.720619678"
irb(main):080:0>

As you can see the conversion to float and back to Time is off by a few nano-seconds and the database either didn't return any records or was returning the same set of records. This isn't something you can usually see in production, right ? Unless you have huge traffic and happen to have records created exactly at the same moment.

The solution is to simply send Time.now.strftime to the JavaScript and then use Time.parse to reconstruct the value.

irb(main):077:0> 
irb(main):001:0> require 'time'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> Time.parse(now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%9N')).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%9N')
=> "2016-03-08 10:54:26.720619705"
irb(main):003:0>

If you'd like to read more about floating point arithmetics please see http://floating-point-gui.de.