Re: [boost] Re: Big integer library

From: Christoph Ludwig (cludwig_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-04-29 10:15:18

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 01:40:47PM +0200, Richard Peters wrote:
> From: "Christoph Ludwig" <cludwig_at_[hidden]>
> > I didn't read earlier discussions of your proposal. But could you
> > briefly summarize what does your library set apart from other
> > arbitrary precision libraries (from the top of my head: gmp, libI,
> > cln, piologie...)?
> 
> There is not much special about my library. Like the gmp, this library uses
> expression templates to avoid the creation of temporary values, which when
> the values become large provide an increase in performance. 

I sometimes wonder whether a bigint library that implements move
semantics could not provide an additional significant efficiency
gain. (Since I can avoid temporaries most of the time, my applications
don't profit from expression templates that much.) I never performed
experiments, though, this is only a conjecture. 

Do you have any plans in this direction?

> Once the
> interface matures, I want to make the library be able to use other arbitrary
> magnitude libraries to perform high-speed calculations.

Hm, I "inherited" some time ago the task to maintain a computer
algebra library that can be built on top of several bigint libraries. 
Since these libraries are optimized for different use cases and this
fact shows in their respective interfaces, it is hard to come up with
a wrapper that does neither favour one particular library nor pulls
all libraries down to their least common denominator.

> Apart from that, this library is released under the boost
> license. The other libraries that I know of are released under GPL
> or have other restrictions. 

This is certainly a valid point.

Regards

Christoph
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