I can understand why -1 was used here, but it can cause some pain when loading the message, say in elasticsearch with the value 0 instead of 0.00 for example.

For me, it creates a field of type long instead of what I really want it to be, a float and I'm sure there may be other specific cases.

I propose adding a FloatingPointPrecission variable somewhere around here with a default value of -1, then everyone is happy :)