Python and GMP.

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 05:17:05 EDT 2009


On Apr 21, 8:57 am, alessiogiovanni.bar... at gmail.com wrote:
> Ok, thanks for your answers. I understand the problems of licensing,
> but
> we could to learn from GMP's source code to improve the Python's int
> implementation,
> mainly because, GMP is very fast. We could violate the GPL?

Suggestions for ways to improve Python's int implementation are
very welcome.  But note that Python favours portability (and also
readability and maintainability of source code) over speed here:
at least some of GMP's speed comes from using hand-crafted
assembler for common platforms, and that's really a no-go
area for Python.

There's at least one more optimization (to multiplication, as it
happens) that I plan to get in before 3.1.  See

http://bugs.python.org/issue3944

Apart from that, I'm not sure there's much snot left to be
optimized out, as they say...

Mark



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