Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Designing concrete types

A concrete type is used to define how data is organized. In Julia, there are two kinds of concrete type:

• Primitive type
• Composite type

Primitive types carry pure bits. Julia's Base package comes with a variety of primitive types—signed/unsigned integers that are 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, or 128-bits wide. Currently, Julia only supports primitive types with numbers of bits that are multiples of 8. For example, it is possible to define a 256-bit integer type (32 bytes) if we have a use case that requires very large integers. How to do this is outside the scope of this book. If you feel that this is an interesting project, you can consult Julia's source code on GitHub and see how existing primitive types are implemented. ...