Should BigNumber.from accept MAX_SAFE_INTEGER?

[fvictorio]

BigNumber.from(Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER) throws an error. The cause is this line:

ethers.js/packages/bignumber/src.ts/bignumber.ts

Line 248 in d395d16

if (value >= MAX_SAFE || value <= -MAX_SAFE) {

I feel that condition should use a >, not a >=. But maybe this is by design?

[ricmoo]

This is intentional to better detect errors near the boundary. I have seen a lot of instances where people use numbers inappropriately, so I error on the side of caution.

This obviously cannot help in all cases (since IEEE 754 could have corrupted the value anywhere along the way), but consider:

> Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER + 2 - 1 === Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER
true

// This would mean with the above change this would succeed, when I want it to fail:
// BigNumber.from(Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER + 2 - 1)

I would ideally lower the threshold a lot further, but there is always going to be cases of undetectable corruption, so this seemed like a fair compromise...

Does that make sense?

[fvictorio]

Uhm, honestly, I don't quite understand how this helps since, as you said, there are infinite ways to end up with a number x <= MAX_SAFE_INTEGER via "unsafe" transformations. The same argument could be done about Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER + 2 -2. And since that's the case, I would just opt for the simplest approach of "I accept anything that Number.isSafeInteger says it's safe".

Anyway, I just wanted to check if this was intentional or not, thanks!