sinf

sinf is a standard library function that computes the sine of a single-precision floating-point value. In C and related languages, sinf takes a float argument representing an angle in radians and returns a float in the range [-1, 1]. The function is declared in math-related headers, such as <math.h> in C and <cmath> in C++, where it is available as std::sinf in the C++ namespace.

The numerical result is produced using techniques appropriate for single-precision arithmetic, typically involving range reduction and a polynomial or rational approximation optimized for speed and accuracy on 32-bit floats. Because it operates in IEEE 754 single precision, sinf inherits the precision and rounding characteristics of that format. For finite inputs, the result is defined; for NaN or infinite inputs, the result is NaN according to the standard.

Sinf is the single-precision counterpart to the double-precision sin function (and to sinl for long double). On platforms without hardware support for single-precision sine, implementations may fall back to software-emulated routines. Sinf is commonly used in graphics, games, and real-time systems where the computational cost and memory footprint of double precision are undesirable.

Example usage: float a = sinf(0.5f); This computes the sine of 0.5 radians and stores the result in a.