java - Long vs BigInteger

Question

I understand that both java.lang.Long and java.math.BigIntegercan hold very large natural numbers.

I also know Long's max value, but what is the max value for BigInteger?

And aside from capacity, would BigInteger ever perform better when working with generally large integers that still fall in Long's range?

Question

Is the only consideration: is my value too large for Long?

Answer 1

BigInteger is capable of holding far bigger numbers than Long. BigInteger seems capable of holding (2 ^ 32) ^ Integer.MAX_VALUE, though that depends on the implementation (and, even if truly unbounded in the implementation, there will eventually be a physical resource limit) See explanation here.

The range of Long is [-9,223,372,036,854,775,808, +9,223,372,036,854,775,807].

Long will perform better than BigInteger so it really depends on what the size of your values will be. If they would all fall under Long's max value, it makes no sense not to use Long. If any would be bigger than the Long max value, you pretty much have to use BigInteger.