Proposal for Decimal64 and Decimal128 value-based classes

[Raffaello Giulietti]

Ciao Maurizio,

thanks for your interest.


On 2021-03-30 23:01, Maurizio Cimadamore wrote:
> Add me to the list of interested folks.
> 

Will do.


> Such types are useful when interacting with System ABIs, and the Foreign 
> Linker API needs "well-known" carrier which model these types in Java. 
> There are also other interesting types to be explored in that domain, 
> such as Long128, LongDouble (extended precision float) and HalfFloats.
>  > Maurizio
> 
> On 30/03/2021 21:54, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>>
>>> On Mar 30, 2021, at 1:03 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Overall, I'd be happy to see Decimal types that are aimed at 
>>> "reasonable precision" in addition to the infinite precision that BD 
>>> offers.  (After Valhalla, of course.)
>>>
>> Yes, me too.
>>
>> Raffaello, as an experiment you could develop such classes as 
>> primitive classes compiled against recent builds of Valhalla.
>>
>> I would caution against unduly biasing towards "business 
>> applications”, as I think with primitive classes and other possible 
>> features Java can become a better platform for scientific or 
>> engineering purposes.
>>
>> As an example we are making progress with the Vector API and in the 
>> panama-vector repo we have integrated with code of Intel’s Short 
>> Vector Math Library, which may open the possibility for it to be used 
>> by the auto-vectorizer too.
>>
>> Paul.