From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: cwitty@newtonlabs.com (Carl R. Witty) Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.devel Subject: Re: The Guile license and the use of LGPL libs (like GMP). Date: 21 May 2002 12:55:45 -0700 Sender: guile-devel-admin@gnu.org Message-ID: References: <87vg9oqf5b.fsf_-_@raven.i.defaultvalue.org> <3CE3E5D8.A30C3197@pacbell.net> <87elgcqanm.fsf@raven.i.defaultvalue.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.106) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1022011200 8038 127.0.0.1 (21 May 2002 20:00:00 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 20:00:00 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Bruce Korb , Marius Vollmer , guile-devel@gnu.org, guile-user@gnu.org, Greg Troxel Return-path: Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([199.232.76.164]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 17AFnc-00025X-00 for ; Tue, 21 May 2002 22:00:00 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=fencepost.gnu.org) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 17AFni-00075I-00; Tue, 21 May 2002 16:00:06 -0400 Original-Received: from sense-newton-80.oz.net ([216.39.161.80] helo=quasar.newtonlabs.com) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 17AFlV-0006vF-00; Tue, 21 May 2002 15:57:50 -0400 Original-Received: from bogomips.newtonlabs.com (bogomips216 [216.39.155.135]) by quasar.newtonlabs.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian/GNU) with ESMTP id MAA18362; Tue, 21 May 2002 12:55:46 -0700 Original-Received: (from cwitty@localhost) by bogomips.newtonlabs.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian/GNU) id MAA13562; Tue, 21 May 2002 12:55:45 -0700 Original-To: Rob Browning In-Reply-To: Rob Browning's message of "Thu, 16 May 2002 12:12:45 -0500" Original-Lines: 24 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.4.61/Emacs 19.34 Errors-To: guile-devel-admin@gnu.org X-BeenThere: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.9 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.devel:639 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.devel:639 Rob Browning writes: > Not for all purposes -- depends on what your goals are -- if we want a > full numeric tower that's *fast* on multiple platforms, my impression > is we may be better leaving that to numeric experts like the people > working on GMP. You might want to run some benchmarks before you decide on GMP. My impression (from the last time I looked at the issue, maybe a couple of years ago) is that GMP is intended to be asymptotically fast on large numbers, but that it's not particularly fast on smaller numbers. (For instance, you certainly wouldn't want to get rid of fixnums and use GMP numbers for all numbers; when I looked at it, GMP had no optimization for small numbers at all, so computing something like 2*2 would take about 6 function calls and several loops.) Does anybody have any idea what distribution of numbers is typical in programs with bignums? For instance, are most numbers that are bigger than 32 bits in the 32 to 64 bit range, or are there lots of numbers with hundreds of bits? (I don't suppose anybody really knows the answer to this question, but you'll have to make a guess before you can decide whether one implementation is faster than another.) Carl Witty _______________________________________________ Guile-devel mailing list Guile-devel@gnu.org http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-devel