Floating point numbers are no longer encoded as a one to one mapping
of their binary representation, but as short as possible (while still
being acurate). The double-conversion library [1] is used to do the
hard work.
The ECMAScript compatible conversion is used.
[1] https://code.google.com/p/double-conversion/
Numbers like 1.0 were being encoded as <<"1">> which can lead to a bit
of confusion. This merely checks if a decimial point exists and if not
it appends ".0" to the value.
Looks like there's a slight difference in the number of significant
digits supported across platforms in strtod. This just adds a couple to
force it into the bignum code.
Any number that can't be decoded in C is now passed back
to Erlang for decoding.
Large numbers passed to the encoder will make it through
and be processed in Erlang after the main encoding
process.