[BUG 2.15] Number literals bigger than 9 digits break

This is a good one.

If you pass a numeric reference to a helper/component, it works with numbers up to 9 digits. Number with 10 or 11 digits break glimmer with TypeError: reference.value is not a function If the number has 12 digits it doesn’t throw an exception, but the value received on the other side of the reference is undefined

I believe we have an access-out-of-bounds on the glimmer VM.

Quick repo to reproduce: https://github.com/cibernox/big-num-bug

Note that this only happens with number literals {{my-helper 123123123123}} not with bound values {{my-helper num}} no matter how big the value inside num is.

[tomdale]

I think this is related to how the Glimmer compiler encodes primitive literals. JavaScript coerces numbers into 32-bit integers when applying bitwise operations, which we use to store type information (boolean, string, object, etc.) about the literals in the lower 3 bits.

In practice, this means that even though JavaScript allows you to represent values up to 2⁵³, our combination of a) using bitwise operators and b) utilizing the lower 3 bits means that we can’t represent values greater than 2²⁹.

One way to deal with this would be to have a less-efficient primitive type (BigNum?) for >29-bit integers, although maybe it makes sense to have an external number pool just like we do with strings. Maybe @wycats or @chancancode can chime in since this is a system they came up with.

[cibernox]

@roschaefer My temporary workaround is to put that number in the component/controller, and bind it. gets €{{number}} every year