s2geometry VS 0.30000000000000004

I experimented with geospatial Hilbert Curves as a Postgres extension [0] for PostGIS using the S2 [1] spherical geometry library. S2 uses a scale free cell coverage pattern that is numbered using six interlocking space filling Hilbert Curves [2].

By having both high level (cell) and low level (cell id) geometries it was a very powerful library which allowed projection from the hilbert space into a Postgres spatial index (spgist) including various trees, like noted in this article. It appears to be still quite active in development.

[0] https://github.com/michelp/pgs2

[1] https://s2geometry.io/

[2] https://s2geometry.io/devguide/s2cell_hierarchy

If you check the h3geo comparison page, you should see plenty of alternatives to geohash, such as s2 or even h3 itself.

See some discussion I started at https://github.com/google/s2geometry/issues/190

> It was quite hard for me to find open-source implementations of linear quadtrees.

You probably know this, but the S2 library has one: https://github.com/google/s2geometry

https://s2geometry.io shows how this works

If your points are distributed globally, however, I'd suggest using something like s2geometry (calculates over a sphere instead of an ellipsoid which is much faster + already has something called S2ClosestPointQuery).

Some alternative solutions are S2 from Google and H3 from Uber. These don't have the same issues as geohash because they work on a 3-d model of the geoid and not a 2-d cylindrical projection like Geohash.

https://0.30000000000000004.com/

Although it would be good to move in the direction of using a BigDecimal equivalent by default when ingesting unknown data.

There's no such thing as precision for floats. Floating-point calculations are always inaccurate: read this: https://0.30000000000000004.com/

Edit: This specific example even has its own website: https://0.30000000000000004.com/

In everyday math, we know adding 0.6 + 0.3 equals 0.9, right? But when we turn to computers it results in 0.8999999999999999. Surprisingly, this doesn’t just happen only in JavaScript; it’s the same in many programming languages like Python, Java, C too. Also, it’s not just about this specific calculation. There are many more decimal calculations showing similar not-quite-right answers.

Surprisingly common values like 0.1 don't have a precise representation in binary for most formats, including standard floating point number formats. See https://0.30000000000000004.com/ for more detail than you can shake a stick at.

Also if the local tax code states using 5 decimal places for intermediate values when you will introduce “errors” using formats that give greater precision as well as those that give less precision. Having work on mortgage and pension calculations I can state that the (very) small errors seen at individual steps because of this can balloon significantly through repeated calculations.

Furthmore, the name floating point gives away the other issue. Floating point numbers are accurate to a given number of significant figures not decimal places. For large numbers any decimal places you have in the result are at best an estimate, and as above any rounding errors at each stage can compound into a much larger error by the end of a calculation.

You'll love this https://0.30000000000000004.com/