Chad Nelson wrote:
Hi! I'm a long-time user (and admirer) of the Boost libraries, and I've just uploaded a new one to the Boost Vault for consideration: the Extended Integer (XInt) library, a unlimited-precision integer library that I've been working on for the last few months. I'd like to request a preliminary review of it, please.
I know I was supposed to "determine interest" first, but I've seen posts going back at least five years, expressing a desire for such a library, so I didn't think that was really necessary in this case. :-)
It's not perfect. The code is complete, as is the documentation text. But it doesn't yet support auto-linking or Windows DLLs, I'm not sure how the test suite would fit into the Boost test system, and I'm not sure I've got the Jamfile correct. But it should be sufficient for experimental use and review, and I'm eager to hear what you guys think of it.
(I'm writing this in the wee hours of March 26th, I hope it isn't held in the moderation queue for too long.)
Chad, your offering does indeed look like a very promising edition to Boost. Thank-you for the effort, though I do have some questions for its future incarnations: Question 1: Will you be adding an extensions module so that people can use GMP (or other bigint packages) for operation implementations? Question 2: Will you be adding any performance comparisons, say between this library and others? Question 3: Are there any plans to update the interface to make use of expression templates? - certain combinations of operations offer far superior performance when merged (at compile time) as opposed to being computed sequentially. Question 4: Will there be a conversion interface for scientific notion based integers representations? eg: -123e+300 (or even conversion from PODs such as doubles, long doubles or floats to xint::integer) Question 5: Seeing as you touched on the topic of cryptography, will there be a very simple RSA example? (most bigint libraries do this as a cursory indicator of their operational validity) Arash Partow