<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Hi Luciano,</div><div><br>On Jul 12, 2016, at 1:24 PM, Luciano Notarfrancesco <<a href="mailto:luchiano@gmail.com">luchiano@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><span></span></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Eliot Miranda <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eliot.miranda@gmail.com" target="_blank">eliot.miranda@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>Plugins:<br></div><div>Upgrade LargeIntegersPlugin to v2.0</div><div>LargeInteger primitives now deal with 32-bits digits. No change to image code.</div><div><br></div><div>Memory is 8 bytes aligned on Spur. When storing 32/64 bits large</div><div>integers values, allways fill the eight bytes whatever the</div><div>effectivily used size, rather than bother with dissertion of size.</div><div><br></div><div>Generate integer type checking as C macros rather than direct/indirect</div><div>interpreterProxy function call in plugins. This, and 32-bit accessing mean</div><div>singificantly faster large integer arithmetic.</div><div><br></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Awesome!</div><div>The legs are in the architecture endianness?<br></div><div>What are the reasons to not use GMP?</div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div>1. the existing code is functional and adequate. GMP offers no new functionality and may offer performance improvements or may not. But the existing code is capable of being tuned also.<div><br></div><div>2. The existing plugin is internal; with the "new" linkage I wrote two years ago now internal plugins have a much simpler call interface into the VM (no double calls through a pointer anymore; just direct calls on the VM functions). But LGPL forces us to make the plugin external. Hence using GMP implies a loss of performance in marshaling arguments and allocating and returning results.</div><div><br></div><div>IMO these two together make GMP irrelevant. Less compelling reasons are</div><div><br></div><div>3. Yet another library to install on all build environments; AFAIA it's not present on non-Linux platforms</div><div><br></div><div>4. Being a library we don't control we're dependent on others fixing it.</div><div><br></div><div>What reasons, other than brand identity are there for using GMP?</div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>Could we use it if was already installed in the host platform? It seems to me that it would be quite straight forward to call to the GMP low-level API from the LargeIntegersPlugin, without making any changes in the image. <a href="https://gmplib.org/manual/Low_002dlevel-Functions.html">https://gmplib.org/manual/Low_002dlevel-Functions.html</a><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div>
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