On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 10:32:36AM +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| There is an interest in removing GMP, motivated partly by licensing but | also due to portabiltity concerns and the fact that the use of GHC's | memory manager in GMP prevents FFI code from using GMP safely. | | http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ReplacingGMPNotes
Just to summarise our position at GHC HQ on this question:
* We don't much like bundling GMP either. But it works and it's fast. ... * We'd be very happy to have others work on a replacement (a) using a another C library (b) using a Haskell library ... * To replace GMP altogether we'd need to be convinced that we would not lose much performance. ... * There are one or two arbitrary precision libraries in Haskell eg http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2007-August/007909.html
Another possibility that occured to me recently, is to switch Integer to a simpler (perhaps even pure-Haskell) representation, and provide (core? extra? Hackage?) a hsgmp package. If you have big numbers, switching is easy: import Prelude hiding(Integer) import Data.Integer.GMP type Integer = MPZ Stefan