Replacement for GMP as Bignum: ARPREC? Haskell?; OS-X and OpenSSL

Brian Hulley brianh at metamilk.com
Sun Jul 30 08:21:12 EDT 2006


Esa Ilari Vuokko wrote:
> On 7/30/06, Brian Hulley <brianh at metamilk.com> wrote:
>> p.tanski at gmail.com wrote:
>>> GHC Task Ticket # 601 suggests replacing GMP with OpenSSL's Bignum
>>> library, BN. I have two questions concerning this:
>>
>>> From the ticket, this looks very scary:
>>
>>           but its LGPL license is problematic for users of GHC
>>          (it prohibits static linking of GHC-compiled programs, for
>> example).
[snip]
> But in this case, yes, you can't.  You need to provide way to
> relink gmp in you program.  As far as I know, this is simply possible
> by taking all the objs --make generates, other objs and libs and
> giving them on - users need to have ghc distro+their own gmp set in.

Hi Esa -
Thanks for reminding me about the distinction between source and object 
files. I keep forgetting that object files exist (!) and that it's 
sufficient for LGPL to just make them available.

Still, a slight problem is that since there is one object file per source 
file, the names of the object files give quite a lot of information away 
about the structure of the program especially when they are arranged in a 
module hierarchy, so I'll be glad when GMP is replaced by something without 
such a burdensome licence. (Although perhaps I can bundle my object files 
into a single library file but I don't know how to do this yet, or if it 
would really help in the goal to make the code completely obfuscated, 
impenetrable, and unavailable to any rival company... ;-) )

Thanks again,
Brian.
-- 
Logic empowers us and Love gives us purpose.
Yet still phantoms restless for eras long past,
congealed in the present in unthought forms,
strive mightily unseen to destroy us.

http://www.metamilk.com 



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