Python Adventures

Python
Under Python it’s very easy to work with big integers (called ‘long’ type in Python 2). The programmer doesn’t have to worry about the overflow error, the interpreter takes care of it. For instance, let’s calculate 2¹²⁸:

>>> 2 ** 128
340282366920938463463374607431768211456

NodeJS
In JavaScript there is just a ‘number’ type, which is floating point. Actually, there is no integer type in JS :) And big integers are not supported, so you need a library if you want to work with huge numbers.

There is a very nice package called big-integer. It has an excellent documentation with lots of examples. Its usage is quite simple, similar to Java:

#!/usr/bin/env node

"use strict";

var bigInt = require("big-integer");

/*
 * 2 ** 128 == 340282366920938463463374607431768211456
 */

function main() {
    console.log(bigInt(2).pow(128).toString());
}

main();