(Repost) Replacement for GMP as Bignum: ARPREC? Haskell?; OS X and OpenSSL

[Esa Ilari Vuokko]

Hi

On 7/30/06, p.tanski at gmail.com <p.tanski at gmail.com> wrote:
> (Sorry for the repost: I needed to correct a few typos--thanks
> Seth--and clarify a few things.)
>
> GHC Task Ticket # 601 suggests replacing GMP with OpenSSL's Bignum library, BN.
> I have two questions concerning this:
>
> (1) Why not use the ARbitrary PRECision Computation Package (ARPREC)
> by David Bailey, Yozo Hida, Karthik Jeyabalan, Xiaoye Li and Brandon
> Thompson?  Here is a reference web page:
> http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist/
>
> ARPREC is written in C++ but supports calls from C (see
> include/arprec/c_mp.h in the distribution directory).  ARPREC is very
> fast and supports more complex mathematics than BN.  The Licensing for
> ARPREC is not a problem: essentially similar to BSD3.

I think the idea is to get rid of annoying dependencies (GMP), and not to
create new ones (C++).  There's few other big ifs with APREC as far as I
see: Fiddling with FPU precision regs in x86 and possibly problems in
Windows environment.  It might require a bit fiddling to get memory
handling right when using APREC, as well.

In past, I tried to get rid of GMP by replacing it with libtommath
http://math.libtomcrypt.com/
But I have given up for now - because of related and unrelated problems.

But, whoever starts the work probably gets to pick their lib, so OpenSSL's
BN, APREC, LibTomMath or anything else...it's open :-)

Best regards,
Esa