Hextrapolate is a tool to convert numbers between bases (for example: binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal; in fact, any base from Base 2 to Base 36) with arbitrary precision. A running instance can be found at hex.wincent.dev.
Way back in ancient history (late 2003) I wrote a number conversion tool for OS X called WinHex (later renaming it to "Hextrapolate" to avoid confusion with another product of the same name). I did this because I found I frequently needed to perform these kinds of conversions in my development work, I wasn't happy with any of the existing tools, and the project presented me with an opportunity to brush up my skills with the then-new Cocoa Bindings.
You can see the original product page here. It had a couple of interesting features: namely, a nice UI, and the ability to perform arbitrary precision integer conversions, thanks to the venerable GMP library.
I feel a fair bit of nostalgia for this little project because it had documentation that had a single set of source templates from which I could generate multiple outputs (specifically HTML for uploading on the web, and Apple's bastardized pseudo-HTML "help book" format).
In a classic example of Yak shaving, this was built using an object-oriented templating system that I wrote called Walrus, which employed a memoizing "Packrat" PEG based parser generator called Walrat, which was the vehicle that I used to teach myself Ruby and also the first example of a project that I drove pretty much start-to-finish via BDD.
But I digress...
Fast forward to 2015 and I still find myself needing to convert numbers between bases. The ancient Hextrapolate executable no longer runs on the current version of OS X.
What's a developer to do? Use one of countless number converters available online? Do it yourself in the Chrome developer console with (number).toString(base)? Try to get the old Hextrapolate codebase building on current OS X?
Let's scratch that last one right away: Xcode has changed so much with every major version that finding my way around and bringing a project up-to-date is a non-trivial (and unpleasant) undertaking. Not only that, but the aforementioned GMP library is notoriously hard to build.
Why not just rewrite the darn thing in JavaScript? If it involves writing arbitrary precision integer arithmetic routines, sounds like fun. So, this is what you'll find in this repo. (And, for old times' sake, you'll find the old Objective-C codebase on the objective-c branch too).
It's not entirely feature complete (for example, it doesn't have the ability to convert to and from different string encodings, yet), but it does have a couple of tiny extras that the original Hextrapolate didn't have, like shortcut buttons for copying values to the clipboard and producing a "permalink" to a specific number.
It's interesting to again confirm how easy it is to build user interfaces with React. The uni-directional dataflow makes synchronizing parts of the UI ridiculously straightforward, completely obviating the need for MVC and the two-way data binding that Cocoa Bindings was designed to enable. Another interesting thing to note is just how darn good JS engines are nowadays. With only a little bit of time spent in the profiler, I was able to make the arbitrary precision integer arithmetic routines competitive with the performance of the original (compiled) code. On my lowly MacBook Air, at least, we can easily get into the realm of 1,000-bit numbers and more before we notice any kind of sluggishness. There's almost certainly even more performance still left on the table.
Copyright (c) 2003-present Greg Hurrell
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