What to do with Java BigDecimal performance?

Question

I write currency trading applications for living, so I have to work with monetary values (it\'s a shame that Java still doesn\'t have decimal float type and has nothing to s

Answer 1

Had a similar problem to this in an equity trading system back in 99. At the very start of the design we choose to have every number in the system represented as a long multiplied by 1000000 thus 1.3423 was 1342300L. But the main driver for this was memory foot print rather than straight line performance.

One word on caution, I wouldn't do this again today unless I was really sure that the math performance was super critical. In most bog standard webapps the overhead of jdbc access and accessing other network resources swamps any benefit of having really quick math.

Answer 2

Can you provide more insight as to the purpose of the calculation?

What your dealing with is a trade-off between speed and precision. How great will the loss in precision be if you switched to a primitive?

I think in some cases the user may be comfortable with less accuracy in exchange for speed, so long as they can hone in on the accurate calculation when needed. It really depends on what you will use this calculation for.

Perhaps you can allow the user to preview the result quickly using doubles, and then request the more precise value using BigDecimal if they wish?