Like I wrote in the article, the engine uses `rust_decimal` to represent arbitrary precision floating point numbers- this is how the engine supports SQL types likes postgres's `decimal`.
We support using ieee754 floating point numbers as well, but those have no special serialization requirements- the structure of a ieee754 floating-point number was designed so that lexicographical comparisons and numeric comparisons give the same results (I took inspiration from that to write the serialization code that solves the issue, which I'll lay out sometime when I write part 2 of this story).
As part of importing my markdown into medium, I created a github gist with the markdown of the post- after I imported the post into markdown, I deleted the gist, but it seems medium keeps this tag in the page HTML.
With `isize` you can support up to 2^63 duplicate rows, which means that if a row is as short as one byte a single diff can represent several exabytes of rows