Hi internals,
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/BigInt
was a similar approach another dynamically typed language recently took to
support convenient arbitrary precision.
What are your thoughts on making `123_456_000_000_000_000_000_000n` a shorthand
for `gmp_init('123456000000000000000000')` (or a call with equivalent results)
(similar to existing backtick string syntax is a shorthand for `shell_exec()`)
GMP objects already overrides numeric operators. (but having number-like syntax
would make code using those more readable)
Supporting bigints as anything other than explicitly different objects in PHP's
type system
seemed from a discussion thread 5 years ago to have several drawbacks -
https://externals.io/message/77863 :
- Native bigints by default as a result of integer operations would cause a
B.C. break for extensions for
php user code relying on float behavior. The way that division would be
handled would change, for example.
- Decrease in performance was seen during a patch being worked on 5 years ago
to automatically convert overflowing integer operations to big integers
- Requirement to update opcache's inferences to support big integers
A prototype implementation is available at
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/5930
which goes into more details about implementation concerns, licensing of GMP,
and other drawbacks of representing them as a GMP/BigInt class instance instead
of something separate from regular objects.
- Tyson
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