Re: Replacement for GMP as Bignum: ARPREC? Haskell?; OS-X and OpenSSL

Esa Ilari Vuokko wrote:

On 7/30/06, Brian Hulley wrote:

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p.tanski@gmail.com wrote:

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GHC Task Ticket # 601 suggests replacing GMP with OpenSSL's Bignum library, BN. I have two questions concerning this:

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From the ticket, this looks very scary:

but its LGPL license is problematic for users of GHC (it prohibits static linking of GHC-compiled programs, for example). [snip] But in this case, yes, you can't. You need to provide way to relink gmp in you program. As far as I know, this is simply possible by taking all the objs --make generates, other objs and libs and giving them on - users need to have ghc distro+their own gmp set in.

Hi Esa - Thanks for reminding me about the distinction between source and object files. I keep forgetting that object files exist (!) and that it's sufficient for LGPL to just make them available. Still, a slight problem is that since there is one object file per source file, the names of the object files give quite a lot of information away about the structure of the program especially when they are arranged in a module hierarchy, so I'll be glad when GMP is replaced by something without such a burdensome licence. (Although perhaps I can bundle my object files into a single library file but I don't know how to do this yet, or if it would really help in the goal to make the code completely obfuscated, impenetrable, and unavailable to any rival company... ;-) ) Thanks again, Brian. -- Logic empowers us and Love gives us purpose. Yet still phantoms restless for eras long past, congealed in the present in unthought forms, strive mightily unseen to destroy us. http://www.metamilk.com