Reading BigInt in Chrome, how to handle big numbers in JavaScript & CSS architecture
Numerous battles have been carried out by developers with JavaScript’s Math. Today, I found some big news on the web, about BigInt landing in V8.
- Mathias Bynens — BigInt: arbitrary-precision integers in JavaScript
- Adding BigInts to V8
- Source Code — v8/src/objects/bigint.h
It’s not going to rid us of BigNumber.js just yet, but it’s probably going to serve as the starting point for implementing BigDecimal.
Currently, there are a dozen variants to handle big numbers in JavaScript without touching Math, ranging from keeping the numbers as strings to keeping the integer part and the fraction as separate strings in an array and join them together at a later time to using third party libraries which more or less use the same strategies I mentioned before. Here are a couple of articles I picked up by simply googling “handle big numbers in javascript”.
- StackOverflow question: Extremely large numbers in javascript
- Article: Working with large integers in JavaScript
- Article: Large Number Addition in Javascript
- Article: Be careful with JS numbers!
- Article: Handle number overflow in JavaScript
To be honest, I actually just typed “handle big n…” and Google was already suggesting “handle big numbers in javascript”. I wonder why 🤔…
On the projects I’m working on, right now, we’re using bignumber.js but there are other libraries out there:
- big.js — bignumber.js’ younger sibling.
- javascript-bignum
- biginteger.js
To put it in perspective, along with other initiatives of this kind, BigInt proves that the whole JavaScript community (users, stakeholders, regulators) is doing its best to turn JavaScript into a real boy instead of being the Pinocchio of programming languages.
On a different token, in the past couple of days, I had to think a lot about CSS and I remembered about an interesting article I read a couple of years ago. If you’re looking for a way to better organise your styles, definitely check out ITCSS.
The article is riddled with useful links, and I’ve extracted a couple of them, which were the most relevant when I was trying to learn how ITCSS works.