Everyone says that BigDecimal should be used when dealing with money but it’s much slower and takes more memory than double. I would think this would be especially important in high frequency low-latency applications like trading. Do people actually use BigDecimal in such systems or do they use doubles with some kind of workaround to handle the precision issue?

Edit: I do have experience working on trading and risk systems and I see doubles used much more often than BigDecimal so I was curious to see if this is more common in actual practice. Most of the systems I worked on only need precision to the penny so I wonder if that’s the reason?

Also, BigDecimal is a pain to use and code written with it look much uglier than plain doubles.

Hi, So after changing in program the Gross and netSalary to BigDecimal, I got lots of errors and it is not clear how I can fix them. So first of all in the main, I want to print the sum of all netSalaries paid, however when I changed it to BigDecimal it is saying that I cannot apply '+' to java.math.BigDecimal and I really can't find a solution for it. Secondly, my getEmployeeGrossSalary in the superclass RegularEmployees is highlighted and it says that the method recurses infinitely and can only end by throwing an exception and when I run the program I am getting a stackOverflow error because I am calling it in the main to print all salaries from highest to lowest, so why was everything fine when the type was double and how can I fix these errors? Thanks in advance!

import java.math.BigDecimal;
import java.math.RoundingMode;

public class RegularEmployees { //superclass
    protected double employeeGrossSalary;

    RegularEmployees(double employeeGrossSalary) {
        this.employeeGrossSalary = employeeGrossSalary;
    }
 public BigDecimal employeeNetSalary() {
        return new BigDecimal(this.employeeGrossSalary - (this.employeeGrossSalary * 0.1)).setScale(2,RoundingMode.DOWN);
    }
public BigDecimal getEmployeeGrossSalary() { //the method here is highlighted and it says that getEmployeeGrossSalary recurses infinitely and can only end by throwing an exception.
        return new
BigDecimal(String.valueOf(this.getEmployeeGrossSalary())).setScale(2,RoundingMode.DOWN);
    }
}

import java.math.BigDecimal;
import java.math.RoundingMode;

public class ManagerEmployees extends RegularEmployees { //Subclass
    private String managerDegree;

    ManagerEmployees(double employeeGrossSalary, String managerDegree) {
        super(employeeGrossSalary);
this.managerDegree = managerDegree;

public BigDecimal getEmployeeGrossSalary() {
        return new
BigDecimal(String.valueOf(this.getEmployeeGrossSalary())).setScale(2,RoundingMode.DOWN);
    } 
@Override
    public BigDecimal employeeNetSalary(){
        return new BigDecimal(super.employeeGrossSalary - (super.employeeGrossSalary * 0.1)).setScale(2, RoundingMode.DOWN);
    }
@Override
    public BigDecimal getEmployeeGrossSalary() {

        BigDecimal grossSalaryWithBonus = BigDecimal.valueOf(0.00);

        if (this.managerDegree.equals("BSc")) {
            grossSalaryWithBonus = new BigDecimal(super.employeeGrossSalary - (super.employeeGrossSalary * 0.1)).setScale(2, RoundingMode.DOWN);

        } else {

            if (this.managerDegree.equals("MSc")) {
                 grossSalaryWithBonus = new BigDecimal(super.employeeGrossSalary -(super.employeeGrossSalary * 0.2)).setScale(2, RoundingMode.DOWN);

            } else {

                if (this.managerDegree.equals("PhD")) {
                    grossSalaryWithBonus = new BigDecimal(super.employeeGrossSalary + (super.employeeGrossSalary * 0.35)).setScale(2, RoundingMode.DOWN);
                }
            }
        }
        return grossSalaryWithBonus;
    }
}

import java.util.Comparator;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.math.BigDecimal;

public class Main { //main class
public static void main(String[] args){

ArrayList<RegularEmployees> employeesList = new ArrayList<>();

BigDecimal totalNetSalaries = BigDecimal.valueOf(0.00);

                    for (RegularEmployees currentEmployee : employeesList) {
                    totalNetSalaries = BigDecimal.valueOf(totalNetSalaries + currentEmployee.employeeNetSalary()); //Bug here ; Operator "+" cannot be applied to  'java.math.BigDecimal','java.math.BigDecimal' how can I fix it?
                  }
                   System.out.println(totalNetSalaries);

employeesList.sort(Comparator.comparing(RegularEmployees::getEmployeeGrossSalary).reversed());
                    for(RegularEmployees current : employeesList){
                    System.out.println(current.getEmployeeGrossSalary());
                    }