ANN: GMPY 1.11rc1 is available

[casevh]

Everyone,

I'm pleased to annouce that a new version of GMPY is available.
GMPY is a wrapper for the MPIR or GMP multiple-precision
arithmetic library. GMPY 1.11rc1 is available for download from:

http://code.google.com/p/gmpy/

In addition to support for Python 3.x, there are several new
features in this release:

- Even faster conversion to/from Python longs.
- Performance improvements by reducing function overhead.
- Performance improvements by improved caching.
- Support for cdivmod, fdivmod, and tdivmod.
- Unicode strings are accepted on Python 2.x and 3.x.
- Fixed regression in GMPY 1.10 where True/False were no
  longer recognized.

Comments on provided binaries

The 32-bit Windows installers were compiled with MinGW32 using MPIR
1.3.0rc3 and will automatically recognize the CPU type and use code
optimized for the CPU at runtime. The 64-bit Windows installers were
compiled Microsoft's SDK compilers using MPRI 1.3.0rc3. Detailed
instructions are included if you want to compile your own binary.

Future plans

On releasing the GIL: I have compared releasing the GIL versus the
multiprocessing module and the multiprocessing module offers better
and more predictable performance for embarrassingly parallel tasks
than releasing the GIL. If there are requests, I can add a compile-
time option to enable threading support but it is unlikely to
become the default.

On mutable integers: The performance advantages of mutable integers
appears to be 20% to 30% for some operations. I plan to add a new
mutable integer type in the next release of GMPY. If you want to
experiment with mutable integers now, GMPY can be compiled with
mutable version of the standard 'mpz' type. Please see the file
"mutable_mpz.txt" for more information.

Please report any issues!

casevh