🧧 Fixed-Point Decimal Money

Be Precise: using floats to represent currency is almost criminal. — Robert.C.Martin, "Clean Code" p.301

• as fast as int64
• no float in parsing nor printing, does not leak precision
• ISO 4217¹² currency
• block mismatched currency arithmetics
• 100 LOC
• fuzz tests

var BuySP500Price = fpmoney.FromInt(9000, fpmoney.SGD)

input := []byte(`{"sp500": {"amount": 9000.02, "currency": "SGD"}}`)

type Stonks struct {
    SP500 fpmoney.Amount `json:"sp500"`
}
var v Stonks
if err := json.Unmarshal(input, &v); err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

amountToBuy := fpmoney.FromInt(0, fpmoney.SGD)
if v.SP500.GreaterThan(BuySP500Price) {
    amountToBuy = amountToBuy.Add(v.SP500.Mul(2))
}

fmt.Println(amountToBuy)
// Output: 18000.04 SGD

Ultra Small Fractions

Some denominations have very low fractions. Storing them int64 you would get.

• BTC satoshi is 1 BTC = 100,000,000 satoshi, which is still enough for ~92,233,720,368 BTC.
• ETH wei is 1 ETH = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 wei, which is ~9 ETH. If you deal with wei, you may consider bigint or multiple int64. In fact, official Ethereum code is in Go and it is using bigint (code).

Benchmarks

$ go test -bench=. -benchmem .
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/nikolaydubina/fpmoney
cpu: Apple M3 Max
BenchmarkCurrency_UnmarshalText-16      711695404                1.610 ns/op           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkCurrency_AppendText-16         446232057                2.698 ns/op           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkCurrency_MarshalText-16        81956246                13.99 ns/op            8 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkCurrency_String-16             1000000000               1.064 ns/op           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkArithmetic/add-16              924924993                1.305 ns/op           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkJSON/small/encode-16            6004620               198.5 ns/op           160 B/op          3 allocs/op
BenchmarkJSON/small/decode-16            5047149               238.7 ns/op           152 B/op          2 allocs/op
BenchmarkJSON/large/encode-16            4739722               255.7 ns/op           176 B/op          3 allocs/op
BenchmarkJSON/large/decode-16            3737406               315.3 ns/op           152 B/op          2 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinary/small/encode-16         132380481                9.044 ns/op          16 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinary/small/decode-16         100000000               10.80 ns/op           16 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinary/large/encode-16         133549021                8.995 ns/op          16 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinary/large/decode-16         100000000               10.61 ns/op           16 B/op          1 allocs/op
PASS
ok      github.com/nikolaydubina/fpmoney        15.804s

References and Related Work

• ferdypruis/iso4217 was a good inspiration and reference material. it was used in early version as well. it is well maintained and fast library for currencies.
• github.com/shopspring/decimal: fixed precision; faster printing/parsing/arithmetics; currency handling
• github.com/Rhymond/go-money: does not use float or interface{} in parsing; currency is enum
• github.com/ferdypruis/iso4217: skipped deprecated currencies to fit into uint8 and smaller struct size
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217

Footnotes

1. excluding currencies with 4+ minor units CLF, UYW ↩

2. excluding deprecated currencies HRD, HRK, SLL, ZWL ↩