What is difference between double and BigDecimal?

A BigDecimal is an exact way of representing numbers. A Double has a certain precision. Working with doubles of various magnitudes (say d1=1000.0 and d2=0.001 ) could result in the 0.001 being dropped alltogether when summing as the difference in magnitude is so large. With BigDecimal this would not happen.

Is BigDecimal more accurate than double?

Absolutely! Since it takes a comparatively tiny amount of memory, double is much better suited for long arrays of numbers.

What is the difference between a double and a float?

A float has 7 decimal digits of precision and occupies 32 bits . A double is a 64-bit IEEE 754 double-precision floating-point number. 1 bit for the sign, 11 bits for the exponent, and 52 bits for the value. A double has 15 decimal digits of precision and occupies a total of 64 bits .

Should I use float or double?

Double is more precise than float and can store 64 bits, double of the number of bits float can store. Double is more precise and for storing large numbers, we prefer double over float. For example, to store the annual salary of the CEO of a company, double will be a more accurate choice.

Why should we use BigDecimal?

BigDecimal provides full control over the precision and rounding of the number value. Virtually, it’s possible to calculate the value of pi to 2 billion decimal places using BigDecimal, with available physical memory being the only limit.

How much slower is BigDecimal than double?

According to my own benchmarking for my specific use case it’s 10 – 20x slower than double (much better than 1000x) – basically for addition / multiplication.

Why do financial applications not use floats?

All floating point values that can represent a currency amount (in dollars and cents) cannot be stored exactly as it is in the memory. So, if we want to store 0.1 dollars (10 cents), float/double can not store it as it is.

When would you use a float data type?

Integers and floats are two different kinds of numerical data. An integer (more commonly called an int) is a number without a decimal point. A float is a floating-point number, which means it is a number that has a decimal place. Floats are used when more precision is needed.

Why do we use BigDecimal in Java?

The BigDecimal class provides operations on double numbers for arithmetic, scale handling, rounding, comparison, format conversion and hashing. It can handle very large and very small floating point numbers with great precision but compensating with the time complexity a bit.