Sounds slow as hell, what kind of financial systems have you worked with? I write trading software, and pretty much everyone uses integers with implied decimal place, similar to TFA.
How do you know you convert your internal string to a float/int correctly? You have to deal with the numeric types eventually
I've never written any trading software, but out of curiosity, have you done any tests comparing something like a GMP arbitrary-precision number vs a raw integer type.
Obviously the raw integer (64 bit or 128 bit) will go faster since it would have CPU-level assistance, but I'm curious to what that actually ends up being in practice, especially at the scale of trading. Is it 10% faster? 10X faster? Somewhere in between?
How do you know you convert your internal string to a float/int correctly? You have to deal with the numeric types eventually