(Sorry for the repost: I needed to correct a few typos--thanks Seth--and clarify a few things.) 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 static (.a) library because Apple's ln links dynamic libraries in preference to static libraries. (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... Both GHC and nhc98 seem to use GMP, OCaml uses a custom bignum library written by Xavier Leroy and even MLton uses GMP. Robert Dockins wrote a type-based library for arbitrary that can (slowly) handle big numbers (up to 10^15), see http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/typenats.html I don't know what the constraints on making such native Integer support work in GHC but my comment on the evolution of Haskell was not meant badly: native Integer support would require modifications to how Integers are handled in memory. (I would be glad to lend whatever support I could on this, but it seems like a big project.) -Peter Tanski