fastnum

Fixed-size decimal numbers implemented in pure Rust. Suitable for financial, crypto and any other fixed-precision calculations.

API Docs

Overview

This crate is inspired by num_bigint and bigdecimal - an amazing crates that allows you to store big integers and arbitrary precision fixed-point decimal numbers almost any precision.

BigInt internally uses a Vec of decimal digits the size of which is theoretically limited only by the usize max value or memory capacity.

Under the hood BigDecimal uses a BigInt object, paired with a 64-bit integer which determines the position of the decimal point. Therefore, the precision is not actually arbitrary, but limited to 2 ⁶³ decimal places.

Despite the seemingly undeniable advantages at first glance, this approach also has a number of fundamental disadvantages:

• Non-copyable types for both integers and fixed point numbers.
• Dynamic allocation to store even tiny numbers, for example, 0 or 1.
• Extra dynamic allocation for almost any operation (mathematical operations, parsing, converting, etc.).
• Constant calculations are not available.
• Potentially uncontrolled growth of memory consumption and the need to artificially limit it.

Because most practical problems requiring the use of fixed-point numbers do not require so much limit on the number of digits, such as usize, but as a rule it is limited:

Then most real numbers for financial and other systems requiring accuracy can use 256-bit or even 128-bit integer to store decimal digits.

So In this library, a different approach was chosen.

Decimals

fastnum provides a signed and unsigned decimal numbers suitable for financial calculations that require significant integral and fractional digits with no round-off errors.

Any fastnum decimal type consists of an N-bit big unsigned integer, paired with a 64-bit signaling block which contains a 16-bit scaling factor determines the position of the decimal point, sign, special and signaling flags. Trailing zeros are preserved and may be exposed when in string form.

Thus, fixed-point numbers are trivially copyable and do not require any dynamic allocation. This allows you to get additional performance gains by eliminating not only dynamic allocation, like such, but also will get rid of one indirect addressing, which improves cache-friendliness and reduces the CPU load.

Why fastnum?

• Strictly exact precision: no round-off errors (such as 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3).
• Special values: fastnum support ±0, ±Infinity and NaN special values.
• Blazing fast: fastnum numerics are as fast as native types, well almost :).
• Trivially copyable types: all fastnum numerics are trivially copyable (both integer and decimal, ether signed and unsigned) and can be stored on the stack, as they are fixed size.
• No dynamic allocation: no expensive sys-call's, no indirect addressing, cache-friendly.
• Compile-time integer and decimal parsing: all the from_* methods on fastnum integers and decimals are const, which allows parsing of integers and numerics from string slices and floats at compile time. Additionally, the string to be parsed does not have to be a literal: it could, for example, be obtained via include_str!, or env!.
• Const-evaluated in compile time macro-helpers: any type has its own macro helper which can be used for definitions of constants or variables whose value is known in advance. This allows you to perform all the necessary checks at the compile time.
• Short dependencies list by default: fastnum does not depend on many other crates by default. Support for crates such as rand and serde can be enabled with crate features.
• no-std compatible: fastnum can be used in no_std environments.
• const evaluation: nearly all methods defined on fastnum integers and decimals are const, which allows complex compile-time calculations and checks.

Installation

To install and use fastnum, simply add the following line to your Cargo.toml file in the [dependencies] section:

fastnum = "0.1"

Or, to enable various fastnum features as well, add for example this line instead:

fastnum = { version = "0.1", features = ["serde"] } # enables the "serde" feature

Example Usage

use fastnum::{udec256, UD256};

fn main() {
    const ZERO: UD256 = udec256!(0);
    const ONE: UD256 = udec256!(1.0);

    let a = udec256!(12345);

    println!("a = {a}");
}

Features

Generic numeric num_traits trait implementations

The numtraits feature includes implementations of traits from the num_traits crate, e.g. AsPrimitive, Signed, etc.

Random Number Generation

The rand feature allows creation of random fastnum decimals via the rand crate.

Serialization and Deserialization

The serde feature enables serialization and deserialization of fastnum decimals via the serde crate. More details about serialization and deserialization you can found in

Zeroize

The zeroize feature enables the Zeroize trait from the zeroize crate.

Database ORM's support

The diesel feature enables serialization and deserialization of fastnum decimals for diesel crate.

The sqlx feature enables serialization and deserialization of fastnum decimals for sqlx crate.

Autodocs crates support

The utoipa feature enables support of fastnum decimals for autogenerated OpenAPI documentation via the utoipa crate.

Performance

fastnum is blazing fast. As much as possible given the overhead of arbitrary precision support. It x10 faster than bigdecimal and x2 - x4 slower than native floating point f64 Rust type.

Some benchmark reports are shown below:

Parse from string

Allocation

You can run benchmark tests with Criterion.rs tool:

cd benchmark
cargo criterion

Testing

This crate is tested with the rstest crate as well as with specific edge cases.

We have more than 7000 tests, so we recommend running it using nextest:

cargo nextest run --all-features

Minimum Supported Rust Version

The current Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV) is 1.82.0.

Documentation

API Docs

NB: fastnum is currently pre-1.0.0. As per the Semantic Versioning guidelines, the public API may contain breaking changes while it is in this stage. However, as the API is designed to be as similar as possible to the API of Rust's primitive integers, it is unlikely that there will be a large number of breaking changes.

Compile-Time Configuration

You can set a few default parameters at compile-time via environment variables:

Future Work

There are several areas for further work:

• Micro-optimization of big integer types using vector extensions (SSE2, SSE4.2, AVX2, AVX512F, etc.).
• Const trait implementations once they are stabilized in Rust. (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/67792)
• Integration with a large number of crates (ORM's, auto-docs crates, etc.).

Licensing

This code is dual-licensed under the permissive MIT & Apache 2.0 licenses.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Changelog

view changelog