Hi!

Other than decreased performance and not using literals and operators directly, are there any other disadvantages to using BigInt and BigDecimal (in particular in Java)?

Thanks.

  • TauZero@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    The arbitrary precision may cause your bignums to balloon out of control in memory/cpu usage after repeated multiplication, unless you can prove that it will not. For example:

    double x = 1;
    while (true){
        x *= Math.exp((Math.random()*2 - 1) / 1000);
    }
    

    Would work perfectly fine with floats and x will remain about 1, but with BigDecimal it will grind to a halt.