Adding my use case but it mostly aligns with what others have already
mentioned, with a couple of additional explicit highlights:
I am maintaining a couple of packages that ingest data from binary files
generated from other languages. It is not uncommon to have to read
int64, uint32 or uint64 from these binary files.
Currently, I have to use custom code, usually in C, to read these types
& convert them to int32 if they can fit and convert to NA / double /
bit64 otherwise depending on the case. I would be delighted to be able
to remove this custom code and rely on native support for larger integers.
Compared to other answers, I would like to insist on two points, which
may very well already be included in your proposal:
- the same issue exists for uint32 & uint64 so a solution addressing
these would provide even more value than a solution just for signed int64
- it would be great if these new data types were usable directly with
readBin() / writeBin()
Best wishes,
Hugo
On 24/07/2026 20:04, luke-tierney--- via R-devel wrote:
R integers are current limited to a magnitude ot 2^31 - 1. Integer
values up to a magnitude of 2^53 can be represented exatcly as
doubles. At times it would be useful to be able to handle larger
values.
Several options for adding support for large integers to R are under
consideration, each with advantages and disadvantages. To help with
deciding how to move forward it would be helpful to have a collection
of use cases where something is either difficult or impossible to
achieve with the current R integer representations. Examples would be
most helpful if they are concrete enough to allow us to build test
cases.
Thanks,
luke
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