Replacement for GMP: Update

Peter Tanski p.tanski at gmail.com
Thu Aug 10 12:47:19 EDT 2006


Einar,

>> *    "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project
>> *    for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/)".
>>
>> All developers would have to do is include the acknowledgment stated
>> above.
>
> I think this is not bad for specific applications, but forcing this
> upon all code compiled by GHC would be bad. I think the compiler
> should not link applications by default to things that force
> license related things.
>
> I think this is one reason GMP is being replaced.
>
> ps. personally I don't think the advertising clause is bad, but
> I think it is bad to force it on other users.

You may be right.  The licensing problem with GHC, as I understood  
it, is summed up at <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ 
ReplacingGMPNotes>.  LGPL is very restrictive.

As I have been working on separating BN out of the main OpenSSL  
distribution, renaming symbols and generally reforming it into a  
custom, stand-alone library for GHC I could take it one step further  
and implement it from scratch as a GHC library.  Implementing the BN  
library from scratch may take some time but I will give it a shot and  
see if I can't get better benchmarks.  The downside is that I would  
have more incentive to remove some Cryptography-based cruft, such as  
BN_nnmod, BN_mod_add, BN_mod_sub and the BN-random routines, as these  
are unnecessary for Prelude and GHC.

Best regards,
Peter


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