What happens in Java when we have to deal with large decimal numbers? Numbers that must be accurate, of unlimited size and precision? We use BigDecimal, of course. Yet, I have a sense that we tend to curse every time we do. Why is that?
BigDecimal
I think that the main reason why we dislike working with BigDecimal is that its so much more clunky than working with a primitive type. There are no literals to construct them easily. Its only in Java 5 that constructors taking an int/long have been added.
And then there are the mathematical operations. Calling methods is just a whole lot more verbose and confusing than using operators.
// yucky BigDecimal
BigDecimal dec = new BigDecimal("12.34");
dec = dec.add(new BigDecimal("34.45")).multiply(new BigDecimal("1.12")).subtract(new BigDecimal("3.21"));
// nice primitive double
double d = 12.34d;
d = (d + 34.45d) * 1.12d - 3.21d;
Finally, there is the performance question. Perhaps this is a Java Urban Myth, but my brain associates BigDecimal with poor performance. (Note to self... really need to benchmark this!).
So, I was wondering if anything can be done about this? One solution would be a new primitive type in Java - decimal - with all the associated new bytecodes. Somehow I doubt this will happen, although it would be nice if it did.
More realistic is operator overloading (lets just consider BigDecimal for now, and not get into the whole operator overloading debate...). Overloading for BigDecimal has definitely been talked about in Sun for Java 7, and it would make sense. However, as can be seen in my example below, there is really a need for BigDecimal literals to be added at the same time:
// now
BigDecimal dec = new BigDecimal("12.34");
dec = dec.add(new BigDecimal("34.45")).multiply(new BigDecimal("1.12")).subtract(new BigDecimal("3.21"));
// just operator overloading
BigDecimal dec = new BigDecimal("12.34");
dec = dec + new BigDecimal("34.45") * new BigDecimal("1.12") - new BigDecimal("3.21");
// with literals
BigDecimal dec = 12.34n;
dec = dec + 34.45n * 1.12n - 3.21n;
As you can see, the literal syntax makes a big difference to readability (I've used 'n' as a suffix, meaning 'number' for now. Of course the main issue with operator overloading is precedence, and that would need quite some work to get it right. I would argue that if literals are added at the same time, then precedence must work exactly as per other primitive numbers in Java.
One possibility to consider is replacing BigDecimal with a new class. I don't know if there are backwards compatability issues holding back the performance or design of BigDecimal, but its something to consider. Obviously, its difficult though, as BigDecimal is, like Date, a very widely used class.
A new idea?
One idea I had tonight was to write a subclass of BigDecimal that uses a long for internal storage instead of a BigInteger. The subclass would override all the methods of BigDecimal, implementing them more quickly because of the single primitive long storage. If the result of any calculation overflowed the capacity of a long, then the method would just return the standard BigDecimal class. I'd love to hear if anyone has had this idea before, or thinks that it would work well.
By the way, I thought of this in relation to JSR-310. It could be a specialised implementation of BigDecimal just for milliseconds, allowing arbitrary precision datetimes if people really need it.
And finally...
And finally, could I just say that I hate the new Java 5 method on BigDecimal called plus(). Believe it or not, the method does absolutely nothing except return 'this'. Who thought that was a good idea???
Summary
Hopefully this random collection of thoughts about BigDecimal can trigger some ideas and responses. There is still time before Java 7 to get a better approach to decimal numbers, and stop the use of inaccurate doubles. Opinions welcome as always.
