This package implements fixed-width integer types similar to standard builtin-ones like Int
or UInt128
.
The following types, with obvious meaning, are exported: Int256
, UInt256
, Int512
, UInt512
, Int1024
, UInt1024
;
they come with string macros to construct them (like for Int128
and UInt128
), e.g. int256"123"
.
It's possible to instantiate a new pair of types with the exported @define_integers
macro:
julia> BitIntegers.@define_integers 24
julia> UInt24(1), Int24(2)
(0x000001, 2)
julia> BitIntegers.@define_integers 8 MyInt8 MyUInt8
julia> MyUInt8(1)
0x01
julia> myint8"123" # the string macro is named like the type, in lower case
123
These custom integers work as similarly as possible to bit integers defined in Base
.
In particular type promotion (promote_rule
), with the additional following rules:
when two types have the same signedness (both <: Signed
or both <: Unsigned
) and bit widths:
- when both types are defined with
@define_integers
,promote_rule
returnsUnion{}
, which meanspromote_type
will end up returning an abstract type (viatypejoin
); the user can disambiguate by defining its ownpromote_rule
; - when one type is defined with
@define_integers
and the other is defined inBase
,promote_rule
returns the former.
This package is implemented using primitive type
and julia intrinsics, the caveat being that it might
not always be legal (e.g. in some julia versions, Primes.factor(rand(UInt256))
used to
make LLVM abort the program, while it was fine for Int256
).
There are another couple of outstanding issues:
-
the intrinsics for division operations used to make LLVM fail for widths greater than 128 bits, so they are here implemented via conversion to
BigInt
first, which makes them quite slow; it got slightly better in recent julia (nightly pre-1.10), where it printsJIT session error: Symbols not found: [ __divei4 ]
but at least doesn't abort. -
prior to Julia version 1.2: for some reason, importing this code invalidates many precompiled functions from
Base
, so the REPL experience becomes very annoyingly slow until functions get recompiled (fixed by JuliaLang/julia#30830); -
prior to Julia version 1.4: creating arrays of types of size not a power of two easily leads to errors and segfaults (cf. e.g. rfourquet#1, fixed by JuliaLang/julia#33283).
- fix incorrect
bswap
for odd byte-sizes (#41)
- change and document how
promote_rule
is implemented (#36) - export
@define_integers
- fix performance bug in bitshift for widths <= 128 bits