bignums, gmp, bytestring, .. ?

[Jeremy Shaw]

At Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:44:32 +0000,
Neil Mitchell wrote

> One advantage you probably haven't thought of is the size of the
> binary. Currently GMP adds about 50Kb on to the Yhc runtime, for what
> in the most cases is probably an occasional addition. If the bytecode
> for a bignum library was less than this then there could be a
> substantial size saving.

On a related note -- dropping the gmp requirement would also make it
easier to port yhc to non-unix platforms.

I have tried on a few occasions to compile the yhc runtime for PalmOS,
but I can never get gmp built for PalmOS. So, a byte-code version
could be advantageous there too. I don't plan to do a lot of bignum
intensive computation, so it would not be a problem if the byte-code
version was 10 or 100 times slower.

j.