# Chapter 27 The num library: arbitrary-precision rational arithmetic

The num library implements integer arithmetic and rational arithmetic in arbitrary precision. It was split off the core OCaml distribution starting with the 4.06.0 release, and can now be found at https://github.com/ocaml/num.

New applications that need arbitrary-precision arithmetic should use the Zarith library (https://github.com/ocaml/Zarith) instead of the Num library, and older applications that already use Num are encouraged to switch to Zarith. Zarith delivers much better performance than Num and has a nicer API.