Scala can provide us with a variety of number types and Spire adds to this!
However, there are questions we have, such as, what are their use cases? Denis Rosset answered these questions at Scala Days.
Pick your number type with Spire
Scala provides a variety of number types: `Int`, `BigInt`, `Float`, `Double`, `BigDecimal`... and Spire adds a few types on top: `Rational`, `Real`, `Interval`. What are their use cases? What are the corresponding tradeoffs in robustness, precision, speed, memory, and availability of operations? How can we swap quickly between number types in a codebase? How fast is Scala JVM/JS/Native compared to C++?
The visual benchmarks will be based on the Mandelbrot fractal.
About Denis Rosset
I am a maintainer of the Spire library and a postdoctoral researcher at Perimeter Institute working on probabilistic models. I use Scala extensively in my research work and wrote Spire-based libraries to handle linear algebra, permutations or array-backed data structures. When not using Scala, I write code in MATLAB and curiously enjoy it. I participated at the 2018 Scala Spree at EPFL, and brought a small group of participants to their first Spire contribution.
This talk was given by Denis Rosset at Scala Days 2019.