[Vm-dev] pluginizing Galois Fields

[David T. Lewis]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 11:45:26AM -0800, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> 
> > On 18-12-2015, at 11:25 AM, Robert Withers <robert.w.withers at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The point of this email is to see if the folks who would know how to
> > represent polynomials and operations in Slang would be interested in
> > working towards this performance effort, whether through discussion of
> > implementation. How would you Slanginize a polynomial and it's operations?
> 
> No need. Just write that part in a plain old C or whatever file. Call the
> relevant functions from a stub generated by  slang. Look at, for  example,
> DropPlugin; there is a generic part created from the slang that calls eg
> dropRequestFileName which is implemented in platforms/??/plugins/DropPlugin/sq??DragDrop.c etc
>

Actually either way is fine. If it's easy to implement in C, then do that
exactly as Tim suggests. If you prefer implementing in Smalltalk, you can
do that too, just stick to simple Smalltalk that is likely to be translatable.

Robert, I'm not offering to implement this, but if you go to the trouble
of producing a Smalltalk implementation then I'm sure that either Tim or
I or someone else will be happy to help you make it "slangified" such that
it can be translated to C in a plugin, like the other Cryptography plugins.

If you are implementing your algorithm from scratch, then it would be
nice if it could be done in Smalltalk, because that means we can all
read it, play with it in the image, and write unit tests to validate and
document its behavior. We can figure out the translation to C afterwords,
once you have a good implementation in Smalltalk (and yes I will help
with that).

On the other hand, if you are trying to adapt some existing C code that
already works, then you are better off following Tim's original suggestion
above.

Dave