What are the plans of Mongoose to support BigInt?

[koresar]

Starting node.js v10.3 the new data type was introduced - BigInt. It's Stage 3 atm.

Are there any plans or work going to support it same as Number, Buffer, Date, Map etc are supported?

[Fonger]

MongoDB does not support BigInt type atm.
As long as mongodb does not support it, mongoose shouldn't support it.

Creating a mongoose plugin for BigInt is possible though however you have to cast BigInt to string or binary in MongoDB.

[vkarpov15]

This is something we should be able to add for the future. JavaScript BigInts are just 64 bit ints, and MongoDB does support 64 bit ints, so we would just need to expand mongoose-long to cast BigInts. Should be doable.

[koresar]

So which is right Vitaliy?

Mongoose do not plan to support BigInt natively.

Mongoose plans to support BigInt natively.

Mongoose is indecisive at the moment.

[Fonger]

@koresar Sorry I didn't know that BigInt was just 64 bit int so @vkarpov15 was right.

Mongoose will support BigInt because MongoDB has Long type (basically the same)
There's an existing plugin called mongoose-long which can store 64bit integer value. This is doable by casting BigInt to BSON.Long.

I think if if BigInt is out, it's time to consider support it by native. Not just in a plugin.
That's just my opinion though.

[koresar]

Great to hear!

BigInt is out since nodejs v10.3.

[koresar]

I've taken a deeper look at the BigInt. It's definition is: Arbitrary Precision Integer. This means they are not 64 bit ints.
https://github.com/tc39/proposal-bigint

Run this line in latest Chrome console:

const myBigInt = 2n**524288n;
console.log(myBigInt);

It will render 157828 characters long string!

So, @Fonger you were actually right in the beginning. I really doubt MongoDB would ever support this type of data. :)

Let me clarify for future: mongoose does not support ESNext BigInt natively and do not plan to.

Thanks you all!
Cheers.

[vkarpov15]

Ah ok, I misread this part of the BigInt spec. This means we would need a new plugin, mongoose-long won't work. MongoDB does support storing binary data so we might store bigints using buffers. Thoughts?

[koresar]

Sounds like a plan. The new plugin name better be mongoose-bigint (not yet taken).

[nodegin]

This is really needed, Node.js now support BigInt natively and we definitely do not want to deal with Decimal128.

[Fonger]

The problem is that that MongoDB doesn't support BigInt at this moment.

You can always use Binary (Buffer with mongoose) to store BigInt, however, anything related to arithmetic update operations won't work. Comparison in Binary has unexpected behavior too. and mongoose can't handle that for you.

If what you want is just storing the value inside mongodb, you can use bigint-buffer to convert the value to buffer and then save it.

[vkarpov15]

@Fonger that's an interesting idea, we should be able to store BigInts as buffers, but then you won't be able to do $inc, etc.