8

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.

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[-] TauZero@mander.xyz 6 points 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.

[-] TheCee@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Interesting. Is there a way to set a limit to the size of individual instances?

[-] TauZero@mander.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Give it a MathContext with the max precision that you want to allow.

[-] TheCee@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks, that doesn't sound so bad.

this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
8 points (78.6% liked)

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