See https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/887, which will at
least be partially fixed by this.
From the spec https://golang.org/ref/spec#Conversions:
"In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex
values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion
succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent."
This ended up setting the converted values to 0 on Debian's Go 1.4.2
compiler, at least on 32-bit Debians.