An interesting new construct in .NET 4 is the BigInteger.

You may recall that the max value of the following integer types are:

Int16.MaxValue = 32,767

Int32.MaxValue = 2,147,483,647

Int64.MaxValue = 9,223,372,036,854,775,807

Now, it won’t be often that you will need a larger integer type than Int64, but if it happens that you do need one, BigInteger will fill the bill! And how large can a BigInteger get? Thinking to blow an exception with the operation, I cubed Int64.MaxValue and did not exceed it with this result:

784,637,716,923,335,095,224,261,902,710,254,454,442,933,591,094,740,000,000

Wow. I then looked it up and found out that:

The BigInteger type is an immutable type that represents an arbitrarily large integer whose value in theory has no upper or lower bounds.

Apparently, you can make a BigInteger as arbitrarily large as you want, up until the point where you exceed the available memory of the machine and blow an OutOfMemoryException.

Interestingly, I found that the really long number I gave above is more than a octillion times as large as the number of inches to the farthest galaxy yet discovered (a mere 13 billion light-years away). Of course, if things continue as they appear to be going, we may yet need the BigInteger type to represent the size of the US national debt. Otherwise, I cannot imagine needing it for any purpose I expect to encounter.

But what fun!

Check out more about BigInteger HERE.

CAUTION:

But with the huge possibilities of BigInteger come some performance hits!  Doing computations with it costs considerably more CPU time than even Int64. 

Int32 i = Int32.MaxValue;

for (Int32 y = 0; y < i; y++) { }

for (BigInteger b = 0; b < i; b++) { }

The first for/next loop takes 6.95 seconds on my machine, but the second takes 209.44 seconds!  Wow again!  Best use BigInteger only where absolutely necessary or where only a few calculations are needed.