Decimal Type?

[simplesteph]

It'd be amazing to have a Decimal type as a Well Known Type that can be leveraged across all the languages. I have no preference around the back-end implementation of it, as an end user I just think it'd greatly simplify codebases using Decimals

[xfxyjwf]

By "Decimal", I guess you mean something like java.math.BigDecimal in Java that can represent arbitrary precision. I think we should only introduce it if such a decimal type is supported as a built-in type or standard library type by all programming languages that we officially support. That probably won't happen any time soon though.

[simplesteph]

Yes exactly !

[bric3]

The java implementation could understand how to serialize BigDecimal or BigInteger to/from strings. I think this is a missed opportunity. Without it this causes developers to use floating pointing types instead, and use these type for calculation which may be bad. Leveraging protobuf to promote these types would help to use consistent and safe way to handle precision numbers.

[bugproof]

I'm currently struggling with it myself (I'm using C#). I think you can't avoid having to map(convert) to decimal manually everytime you want to use decimal.

Some people pointed to https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/blob/master/google/type/money.proto but there's no information on how to convert from nanos and to nanos.

And it gives you the same result as just storing it as a string.

I wanted to rewrite my code to use gRPC but the state of things with decimal is really putting me off.

[TeBoring]

Maybe a util method from protobuf's supported type (e.g., string) to the decimal type in the specific language?

[simplesteph]

@TeBoring that'd be the easier one. I'd rather have this than Avro's bytes method, as it destroys the user experience, but I'm sure their choices would be important to understand https://avro.apache.org/docs/1.8.1/spec.html#Decimal https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1402

[TeBoring]

@anandolee, this seems to be c# specific. Could you follow on that?

[tephe]

We are also using decimals quite heavily in our application and this is currently an issue for the migration to protobuf. Is there any update on this?