It depends. If you're constrained to one chip and one platform you can characterize or you can estimate the characteristics of a float that matter in your application. In some applications like embedded that's actually totally fine, and modern embedded chips can often do floating point as fast or faster than they can emulate fixed point to work around floating point's drawbacks. On one project I worked on they originally wrote everything fixed point out of fear that floating point would introduce some deleterious effect. But in the end they rewrote parts of the project using floating point to no ill effect and great performance improvement. And there were features of the product that they had to strike because the rewrite needed to support them couldn't touch certain sensitive areas of the code that had been tested extensively in the 2 or 3 years of development. It would have been much better to evaluate the assumption that floats are bad early on in the project and make the decision based on real information. The heuristic they were applying ended up costing part of the product that was strategically important.