What does ~~ (“double tilde”) do in Javascript?

Question

I was checking out an online game physics library today and came across the ~~ operator. I know a single ~ is a bitwise NOT, would that make ~~ a NOT of a NOT, which would

Answer 1

Just a bit of a warning. The other answers here got me into some trouble.

The intent is to remove anything after the decimal point of a floating point number, but it has some corner cases that make it a bug hazard. I'd recommend avoiding ~~.

First, ~~ doesn't work on very large numbers.

~~1000000000000 == -727279968

As an alternative, use Math.trunc() (as Gajus mentioned, Math.trunc() returns the integer part of a floating point number but is only available in ECMAScript 6 compliant JavaScript). You can always make your own Math.trunc() for non-ECMAScript-6 environments by doing this:

if(!Math.trunc){
    Math.trunc = function(value){
        return Math.sign(value) * Math.floor(Math.abs(value));
    }
}

I wrote a blog post on this for reference: http://bitlords.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-double-tilde-x-technique-in.html