Why double Still Outperforms BigDecimal: A Decade-Long Performance Comparison
Overview Many developers consider BigDecimal the go-to solution for handling money in Java. They often claim that by replacing double with BigDecimal , they have fixed one or more bugs in their applications. However, I find this reasoning unconvincing. It's possible that the issue lies not with double , but rather with the way it was being handled. Additionally, BigDecimal introduces significant overhead that may not justify its use. When asked to improve the performance of a financial application, I know that if BigDecimal is involved, it will eventually need to be removed. While it may not be the largest performance bottleneck initially, as we optimize the system, BigDecimal often becomes one of the main culprits. BigDecimal is not an improvement BigDecimal comes with several drawbacks. Here's a quick list of some of its key issues: It has an unnatural syntax. It uses more memory. It creates more garbage (i.e., it causes more frequent garbage colle