# The speed of light is an integer. Why should we care?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-speed-of-light-is-an-integer-why-should-we-care/40108>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Tags:** integer-overflow\
**Created:** [May 25, 2020, 5:16am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-speed-of-light-is-an-integer-why-should-we-care/40108 "2020-05-25T05:16:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 8

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Elrod](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/elrod/32/22461_2.png) [@Elrod](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Elrod)\
**Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 9:56am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-speed-of-light-is-an-integer-why-should-we-care/40108/8 "2020-05-25T09:56:38Z")

</div>

They already have hardware support for an integer type supporting values up to `2^53` (about `9e15`), which is enough for most purposes.  
When these integers “overflow” they turn into `Inf`, which will contaminate downstream computations, so that you know something went wrong.  
Further more, while they only support integer values up to `2^53`, they actually support much larger values than this, but at the downside of no longer supporting every integer. For example, at 1e18, the spacing between actually represented integers is `128`.

I think this type is good enough for most computational purposes.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-speed-of-light-is-an-integer-why-should-we-care/40108)._