rethinkdb protocol : why number data type defined as Double

Question

Looking into here I found the NUM data type is set as Double. How should I pass a 64bit Long value to rethinkdb ?

Answer 1

Stealing the answer from the user group:

There's currently no good way to operate on anything except doubles in RethinkDB. (We'll probably add support for other numeric types in the future.)

If you just need to store and retrieve longs, you could store them as strings. If you know that you won't have any numbers over 2^53, it would also be safe to just store the long value as doubles.