At Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:44:32 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote
One advantage you probably haven't thought of is the size of the binary. Currently GMP adds about 50Kb on to the Yhc runtime, for what in the most cases is probably an occasional addition. If the bytecode for a bignum library was less than this then there could be a substantial size saving.
On a related note -- dropping the gmp requirement would also make it easier to port yhc to non-unix platforms. I have tried on a few occasions to compile the yhc runtime for PalmOS, but I can never get gmp built for PalmOS. So, a byte-code version could be advantageous there too. I don't plan to do a lot of bignum intensive computation, so it would not be a problem if the byte-code version was 10 or 100 times slower. j.