There are two problems with the `decimal` type: it's not IEEE-754 compliant, and it is 16 bytes, which prevents atomic reads/writes (without locks). This is a

There are two problems with the `decimal` type: it's not IEEE-754 compliant, and it is 16 bytes, which prevents atomic reads/writes (without locks). This is a problem in one of my company's applications, as we have a background thread doing work entirely with `decimal` objects, but providing a readout for the GUI necessitates a lock on every write (even if never read), and another for the read by the GUI. There's barely any overhead (nanoseconds worth), but the logic to work around it is a pain, and, if you forget to actually use a lock, good luck with that bug. .NET 8, however, will introduce[0][1] proper IEEE-754 decimal float types, including `Decimal32` and `Decimal64` which will allow atomic reads/writes. [0]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/81376 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/81376 [1]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/79004 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/79004