Introduction Andy Turner

[Brian Goetz]

> I'd like to improve BigDecimal and BigInteger and maybe get a BigRational
> class contributed. The best one of these I have come across I use and is
> part of Eric's BigMath library which has lots of great work:
> https://github.com/eobermuhlner/big-math

Some interesting projects in the area of numerics libraries, all under 
the umbrella of Project Valhalla, would be:

  - Migrating Big{Integer,Decimal} to primitive classes, and evaluating 
performance results.  (The current implementation is kind of "fat", 
there are a lot of fields, and flattening might not be a win here, but 
understanding the tradeoffs would be.)
  - A Decimal primitive class for "small decimals" (measurements, money, 
etc.)
  - A HalfFloat primitive class (either true half-floats or bfloats), 
which would be useful for ML work