On Sat, 29 Jul 2006 21:45:21 -0400 p.tanski@gmail.com wrote:
GHC Task Ticket # 601 suggests replacing GMP with OpenSSL's Bignum library, BN. I have two questions concerning this:
(1) Why not use the ARbitrary PRECision Computation Package (ARPREC) by David Bailey, Yozo Hida, Karthik Jeyabalan, Xiaoye Li and Brandon Thompson? Here is a reference web page: http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist/
ARPREC is written in C++ but supports calls from C (see include/arprec/c_mp.h in the distribution directory). ARPREC is very fast and supports more complex mathematics than BN. The Licensing for ARPREC is not a problem: essentially similar to BSD3.
Note that there would be a basic configuration fix for building OpenSSL's BN library on OS 10.4: you would probably--I had to, myself--have to temporarily move the default installation of /usr/lib/libssl0.9.dylib (and variants) if you want to create a shared (.a) library because Apple's ln links dynamic libraries in preference to shared libraries.
I think you meant "if you want to create a static (.a) library", not "if you want to create a shared (.a) library" Those of you who have some experience with
Apple's gcc also know that Apple's gcc does not recognise the -shared flag.
(2) A much more aesthetic solution would be to replace any external Bignum library with a pure Haskell library. There are many problems with building a truly efficient and fast Bignum library in Haskell but challenges like that are how languages evolve...
-Peter Tanski _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users