Bitwise operators

[ashrafsabrym]

Bitwise operators

[MikeMcl]

Hello ashrafsabrym,
No plans to implement bitwise operations but I may look into it shortly.

[blixt]

@MikeMcl Have you considered implementing bitwise operators since this issue was created?

[MikeMcl]

@blixt
The problem is that a bignumber is stored in a decimal floating point format, so there are no binary digits (bits) to operate on.

The value of a bignumber would first need to be converted to base 2, but, as I'm sure you are aware, that would only make sense for integers as many non-integer decimal numbers can't be represented exactly in binary.

new BigNumber(0.2).toString(2)    // 0.00110011001100110011...    

It doesn't seem appropriate to me to include methods in the library that only operate on integers, and I am not sure there is enough demand for this to justify the added code that would be necessary.

Having said that, you are the second person to mention this issue, so there is some demand, but can you give any examples of how it would be useful to be able to perform bitwise operations on bignumbers.

[blixt]

Right, and I also realized you store the data as strings which makes the whole thing difficult. I created my own implementation intended for integers only, which uses a binary backing store: https://github.com/blixt/js-bigint

[noorfathima11]

Implementing bitwise operations is essential since BigInt has it, but for many purposes where exponents may be considered switching between BigNumber and BigInt is resource heavy.