>From the whitepaper... > The type system rests upon a few base types. In considering which types to > support, we aimed for clarity and simplicity over abundance, focusing on the > key types available in all programming languages, ommitting any niche types > available only in speciļ¬c languages. ... Of particular note is the absence > of unsigned integer types. Because these types have no direct translation to > native primitive types in many languages, the advantages they afford are > lost.
Reading between the lines, it looks like 32bit floats also did not seem to represent a significant performance advantage. Also, since they are unavailable in many languages, there may have been significant concern about feasibility of implementation. For example, how would you write the python code to get the 4 bytes of a 32bit float given that the language only has 64bit floats? I hope this helps. -- Jeff DeCew On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Max Hodak <[email protected]> wrote: > Is there a reason there's no 32-bit floating point type in Thrift? The > difference between floats and doubles can be significant if an RPC is > returning a lot of data. >
