nits on BigInt Proposal

[J Decker]

On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 9:10 AM, J Decker <d3ck0r at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 7:52 AM, kai zhu <kaizhu256 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> looking at the use-cases for this feature @ https://github.com/tc39/prop
>> osal-bigint#use-cases, i'm not convinced it improves everyday
>> programming, or outweigh the benefit and simplicity having a single number
>> type.
>>
>> my nits are:
>>
>> - will this break or complicate existing/future code that does typeof
>> checks for numbers? what are the costs of retooling nodejs mongodb / mysql
>> / etc drivers and the apps that use them?
>>
>
> from what I interpret, it's not a number; it's a different type entirely,
> and does not interop with existing numbers
>
>
>> - how will JSON.parse and JSON.stringify deal with BigInt? the mentioned
>> use-cases for wire-protocols, guids, timestamps, and fixed-point BigDecimal
>> aren’t very useful if it can’t easily be serialized / deserialized across
>> db / persistent storage
>>
>> Apparently it will tostring and require a reviver.
>
>
>> - are there actual common algorithmic use-cases in frontend programming
>> or nodejs apps that need arithmetic on integers greater than 52-bits?
>> should that rather be the domain of webassembly?
>>
>>
> it's definitely NOT a webassembly thing, because it's a high level
> structure.
>
> It would simplify computing large factorials... instead of manually
> chunking stuff to 5 decimal digits or 4 hex digits... not that it's much of
> a use case...
>
> But; there's already a library for this https://www.npmjs.com/package/
> bigint.  Why would this be something to add to the language any more than
> extending JSON?
>
> Regarding currency manipulation; I don't see that as something that is as
> useful on the client side as it is on a server side... so it doesn't really
> need to be in every javascript implementation.
>
> And, it seems more like a way to get around no operator overloading, by
saying 'this specific case warrants it' but not vectors or complex numbers.
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