64-bit number support

[gdamore]

It would be really nice to have support for receiving 64-bit numbers losslessly.

JavaScript doesn't handle these, but the JSON specification quite clearly states that any internal representation limits are just those, and not part of any specification. Consequently, in a language like C, it is quite possible and reasonable to pass around 64-bit values as native numbers instead of doing the encode and decode from string each time.

There are some JSON based APIs which actually do this, writing 64-bit IDs, or timestamps, or statistics, as numbers which might be larger than 53 bits of precision possible via double.

Right now, as it stands, cJSON cannot cope with that sort of API.

[FSMaxB]

64 bit numbers are out of scope for now. Not just because C89 doesn't actually guarantee the existence of a 64bit integer type.

[bmah888]

I'd like to put in a request for this enhancement, as the primary maintainer of the iperf3 bandwidth measurement utility. iperf3 uses cjson and also needs to read and write 64-bit integer quantities. In iperf3 we imported the cjson sources and applied a local patch to get the required 64-bit support. If cjson supported this, that would remove one of the reasons for including cjson.[ch] in the iperf3 source tree. (In my ideal world, iperf3 would just depend on having cjson installed as just another package installed in the operation system. I am not sure for how many platforms that is actually feasible.) Thanks in any case for continuing to maintain this library.