Re: [boost] [xint] quick review

Subject: Re: [boost] [xint] quick review
From: Steven Watanabe (watanabesj_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-03-15 11:51:55

AMDG

On 03/15/2011 06:48 AM, Domagoj Saric wrote:
>
> "Steven Watanabe" <watanabesj_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 
> news:4D7E2D5D.5050304_at_providere-consulting.com...
>> I don't think fixed size integers are necessary
>> for a Boost bigint proposal to begin with.
>
> Why?

A Boost library does not need to be all things to all people.
It does need to have a clearly defined scope, and it
does need to do it well.  I would not generally vote
against a library because it is missing feature X,
even if X is something that I actually need.

> First, AFAIK a significant portion of 'bigint' usage falls into the 
> realm of cryptography and encryption keys which usually have fixed 
> power-of-two sizes and both 'fixed' and 'power-of-two' almost always 
> translate to great simplification/efficiency improvements when one 
> gets to the implementation level. This naturally translates to the 
> question "why should I pay for usage of new, try, catch and throw if 
> all I want is to construct a statically known fixed-size public RSA 
> key and use it to verify a message"?

And of course these things are so much more
expensive than the modular exponentiation
required by RSA...

> Second, AFAICT they are trivial to implement (with the right internal 
> design of course, which was demanded of XInt long time ago but it 
> never happened).

In Christ,
Steven Watanabe