How to handle very large numbers

edit

I want to play around with factorials. I found that factorial(10**9) takes about 20 minutes (on my machine, which is a Mac mini with 8GB Memory). Then I tried factorial(10**10) and there I got this:

/Applications/...pathtoSageMath/sage/src/bin/sage-python: line 2:   975 Killed: 9              sage - python "$@"

Then I searched for a SageMath Stirling Formula, which I didn't find (only some related stuff), so I tried it myself:

sage: def s(n):
....:     x=sqrt(2*pi*n)*((n/e)**n)
....:     return x.numerical_approx()
....: 
sage: s(5)
118.019167957590
sage: s(6)
710.078184642185
sage: s(10**10)

This gave me an error after some minutes:

RuntimeError
...
 4047                            relational_operator(self._gobj))
   4048         else:
-> 4049             x = g_pow(self._gobj, nexp._gobj)
   4050         return new_Expression_from_GEx(self._parent, x)
   4051 

RuntimeError: size of exponent exceeds signed long size

Then I tried s(10**9), there I got another error:

python3(755,0x10fbecdc0) malloc: can't allocate region
:*** mach_vm_map(size=18446744073151754240, flags: 100) failed (error code=3)
python3(755,0x10fbecdc0) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
sig_error() without sig_on()
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(no backtrace available)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unhandled SIGABRT: An abort() occurred.
This probably occurred because a *compiled* module has a bug
in it and is not properly wrapped with sig_on(), sig_off().
Python will now terminate.

So what can I do? Is there a special library for very large reals or int or some special commands for getting an approximation of how many decimals a factorial will have? Could I use the log somehow or would this have the same runtime problems?

The reason why I'm asking is that I am rewriting a text which is 20 years old and there's a statement that factorial(10**100) could not be computed (ok, I believe that because of factorial being between O(2**n) and O(2**(2**n))) and factorial(10**8) would take many hours, which was not the case on my machine (see above).

And last but not least I would like to know if there is an upper bound for numbers that sage can handle. I thought not, but now I know otherwise ;-) Also hints to good literature on these topics would be appreciated.