[pharo-project list added back in]

On 5/13/12 1:34 PM, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
> [100000 primeSwingFactorial] timeToRun 3411 [100000 factorial] 
> timeToRun 61219 So gmp is still 40x faster than a reasonably optimized 
> Smalltalk factorial... I think that's fair, because gmp is highly 
> optimized. Since cost is dominated by LargeInteger arithmetic, and 
> since Smalltalk LargeInteger arithmetic in primitives still operates 
> on bytes, I'm not so surprised of the gap... I'd like to see a 64bit 
> image operating on 32 bits positive integers digits, that would 
> already be a progress... Nicolas

For me, the most interesting thing would be to figure out how to 
integrate such external libraries more tightly into the language syntax.

Right now,   x :=  3.14159... always creates a Float, which is stored as 
a double.

x class ===> Float.

What if I wanted to generate a gmplib floating point number (or rational 
or large integer) automatically when the gmplib binding is available?

Could I implement something that makes x a GMPfpWrapper if extra digits 
are supplied?
e.g.:

x := 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510.

x class ===> GMPfpWrapper.

NativeBoost allows one to cascade calls to external libraries if you 
wrap them in assembly language in the method. High speed, 
aribrary-precision floating point complex number arithmetic, can be 
accomplished that way (no examples yet sorry, still learning) as well as 
more complicated stuff. I'm hoping to make a proof-of-concept mandlebrot 
set Morph that can zoom in arbitrarily. 32 bit floats limit the 
resolution terribly.

So...

What can be done to better integrate such libraries? I browsed the 
Parser and other classes but didn't understand what I was seeing well 
enough to figure out how to begin.



L

-- 
Squeak from the very start (introduction to Squeak and Pharo Smalltalk for the (almost) complete and compleate beginner).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6601A198DF14788D&feature=view_all