2012/5/17 Igor Stasenko <siguctua at gmail.com>:
> The biggest downside of GMP library, is that you have to  manage
> resources in C way - i.e. manually..
> No GC -> more homework for adopter(s), and less performance.
>
> In docs it even says: yeah you can plug-in own memory management function(s),
> but beware that memory blocks can have pointers to each other.
> Which means, that even if i create a custom allocator to force this
> library to use
> object memory as heap, it won't work under moving GC.
>

Funny, GST use GMP, and I was just reading Paolo Bonzini reporting GC
was not efficient here:
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-March/126700.html

Nicolas

> On 17 May 2012 01:37, Nicolas Cellier
> <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2012/5/14 Marcus Denker <marcus.denker at inria.fr>:
>>>
>>> On May 14, 2012, at 12:49 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 14 May 2012 00:03, Lawson English <lenglish5 at cox.net> wrote:
>>>>> [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?
>>> For Floats, there is a GNU project maintained by some groups at Inria:
>>>
>>>        http://www.mpfr.org/
>>>
>>> The main goal of MPFR is to provide a library for multiple-precision floating-point computation which is both
>>> efficient and has a well-defined semantics. It copies the good ideas from the ANSI/IEEE-754 standard for
>>> double-precision floating-point arithmetic (53-bit significand).
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Of course, this is a reference and I've added a link page from
>> http://code.google.com/p/arbitrary-precision-float/ in
>> http://code.google.com/p/arbitrary-precision-float/wiki/InspirationSources
>> en clin d'oeil ;)
>>
>> I recommend the light weight Smalltalk library for casual need, fun,
>> education and experimentation.
>> For completness, decimal arithmetic, speed and intensive use, a 100%
>> Smalltalk single programmer library developed in spare time cannot
>> beat many man-years of development of GMP/MPFFR, so the choice shall
>> be quite obvious.
>>
>> ArbitraryPrecisionFloat might still be an option as a fallback code,
>> or for in image replication necessary for persisting external heap
>> allocated data...
>>
>> Nicolas
>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Igor Stasenko.
>