Quick­JS al­ready sup­ports ar­bi­trary-pre­ci­sion dec­i­mals

Quick­JS is a neat JavaScript en­gine by . It’s fast and small (ver­sion 2021-03-27 clocks in at 759 Kb). It in­cludes sup­port for ar­bi­trary-pre­ci­sion dec­i­mals, even though the TC39 dec­i­mal pro­pos­al is (at the time of writ­ing) still at Stage 2. You can in­stall it us­ing the tool of your choice; I was able to in­stall it us­ing Home­brew for ma­cOS (the for­mu­la is called quickjs) and FreeB­SD and OpenB­SD. It can also be in­stalled us­ing esvu. (It doesn’t seem to be avail­able as a pack­age on Ubun­tu.)

To get start­ed with ar­bi­trary pre­ci­sion dec­i­mals, you need to fire up Quick­JS with the bignum flag:

$ qjs --bignum
Quick­JS - Type "\h" for help
qjs > 0.1 + 0.2 === 0.3
false
qjs > 0.1m + 0.2m === 0.3m
true
qjs > 0.12345678910111213141516171819m * 0.19181716151413121110987654321m
0.0236811308550240594910066199325923006903586430678413779899m

(The m is the pro­posed suf­fix for lit­er­al high-pre­ci­sion dec­i­mal num­bers that pro­pos­al-dec­i­mal is sup­posed to give us.) No­tice how we nice­ly un­break JavaScript dec­i­mal arith­metic, with­out hav­ing to load a li­brary.

The fi­nal API in the of­fi­cial TC39 Dec­i­mal pro­pos­al still has not been worked out. In­deed, a core ques­tion there re­mains out­stand­ing at the time of writ­ing: what kind of nu­mer­ic pre­ci­sion should be sup­port­ed? (The two main con­tenders are ar­bi­trary pre­ci­sion and the oth­er be­ing 128-bit IEEE 754 (high, but not *ar­bi­trary*, pre­ci­sion). Quick­JS does ar­bi­trary pre­ci­sion.) Nonethe­less, Quick­JS pro­vides a BigDecimal func­tion:

qjs > BigDec­i­mal("123456789.0123456789")
123456789.0123456789m

More­over, you can do ba­sic arith­metic with dec­i­mals: ad­di­tion, sub­trac­tion, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion, di­vi­sion, mod­u­lo, square roots, and round­ing. Every­thing is done with in­fi­nite pre­ci­sion (no loss of in­for­ma­tion). If you know, in ad­vance, what pre­ci­sion is need­ed, you can tweak the arith­meti­cal op­er­a­tions by pass­ing in an op­tions ar­gu­ment. Here’s an ex­am­ple of adding two big dec­i­mal num­bers:

qjs > var a = 0.12345678910111213141516171819m;
un­de­fined
qjs > var b = 0.19181716151413121110987654321m;
un­de­fined
qjs > BigDec­i­mal.add(a,b)
0.3152739506152433425250382614m
qjs > BigDec­i­mal.add(a,b, { "round­ing­Mode": "up", "max­i­mum­Frac­tion­Dig­its": 10 })
0.3152739507m