[Haskell-cafe] faster factorial function via FFI?

[Dan Drake]

Hello everyone,

I have some code in which the bottleneck is the factorial function. I
began by using a naive

  fac n = product [1..n]

but it looks like there are faster ways to do it. I could try to look up
those faster algorithms and implement them, but I'm guessing that using
libgmp's factorial function is the best way to do it. I'm a poor
programmer, so I don't trust myself to implement those algorithms
properly. Hence I need to use FFI.

...but ghc already uses libgmp for Integers, so shouldn't I be able to
somehow call libgmp's factorial function?

Using regular FFI stuff, it looks like this might get complicated, since
the function doesn't return one of the usual foreign types, so I'd need
to mess around to get the result into an Integer, which is what I need.

Is there an easy way to do this? It might also be faster to use a lookup
table, since most of the time I'll be taking factorials of relatively
small numbers. 

Thanks,

Dan

-- 
Ceci n'est pas une .signature.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20070423/851d2dfe/attachment.bin