Python and GMP.

[Paul Rubin]

alessiogiovanni.baroni at gmail.com writes:
> > Could you test pow(a,b,c) where a,b,c are each 300 decimal digits?
> > This is an important operation in cryptography, that GMP is carefully
> > optimized for.  Thanks.
> 
> 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. 

GMP is a lot more complicated than Python bigint arithmetic.  It's
optimized separately for many different cases and operations.  It uses
assembly language for innder loops.  And the modular exponential
operation pow(a,b,c) is especially carefully tuned in complicated
ways.  Python tries to just have straightforward, reasonably portable
bigints.

I did something like

   try:
     import gmpy
     pow=gmpy.modexp # or whatever it was called
   except ImportError: 
     pass

in an application a while back, so that it would use gmpy if possible
and Python longs otherwise.  That worked pretty well.