New release / tag

[rdewell]

Hi @davdroman – looks like quite a few good changes have been made since the last release. Any chance you could tag a new version, or should we stick with "main" for the time being? Thanks for the very useful and necessary work!

[davdroman]

Hi @rdewell. Thank you for your question.

I've been trying to decide what to do with this library since it doesn't fully address all use cases properly.

The changes in main are quite disruptive. It moves away from relying on doubles, in order to embrace full-on string-only initialization and encoding/decoding. This is a step down from the current release, but I suspect it might be the safest way to go forward.

// latest release (1.1.0)
let foo: PreciseDecimal = 3.133 // valid, not guaranteed for 6+ decimal places
// main (~= 2.0.0)
let foo: PreciseDecimal = 3.133 // invalid
let foo: PreciseDecimal = "3.133" // valid, guaranteed for any amount of decimal places

This also makes PreciseDecimal an even thinner wrapper around Decimal, and one could argue this library becomes redundant in that case, but imo this is not the case. The reason being that Decimal still suffers from an inconvenient and minefield-y set of APIs, which cause an all too tempting inclination for users to forget about its limitations and "hold it wrong". So instead, PreciseDecimal's advantage consists of a much more strict API to ensure safety while Apple bridges these annoying gaps in the Decimal type.

The only reason I haven't made a breaking release with these changes is doubt. So since you asked, I'd kindly like to know your thoughts on this to help me make a decision.

Does my rationale make sense to you?

[davdroman]

This idea has evolved over time. Here's the most up-to-date rationale on the whole thing: #10.