On Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:29:48 -0400, Carter Schonwald
At some point I'd actually like to explore trying to build a satisfactory "integer-fancy" in Haskell, but there's a few technical challenges I'll be trying to do first before there'll be an engineering story for building a satisfactory Haskell replacement that is performant enough to justify dropping Gmp
Basically I think until we can build an alternative with competitive performance in straight ghc Haskell, there's no good argument for dropping Gmp overall. There are a number of great reasons that everyone has mentioned, but it needs to be a net win for everyone before the leap could be justifiable.
I see how clear and nice would a straight haskell implementation would be. But do we actually have any chance to be close to GMP or other C based bignum libraries? I mean they're in development for years and probably has a lot of knowledge burnt into them, no? I consider the following situation already a net win: - same performance as now, - statically linked, so ldd'ing ghc or a compiled program doesn't show gmp, openssl or any other library. Currently the ldding output of a simple haskell binary contains libc + libgmp. libc is very backwards compatible, but gmp causes issues, getting rid of it is a win for me, - possibility to build Ekmett's MPFR binding. Do you consider the stability benefit of working status quo stronger than the ones above?
If I manage to get my target work for 7.10 sorted out with a few months to spare, I may try to spend a few months exploring this, though no promises. Current ghc doesn't have the right primops to do this yet.
Can you please elaborate on this? What primops are needed for a pure haskell solution? Thanks, Gergely