On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Stephen Nuchia<snuchia@statsoft.com> wrote:
I'm definitely interested in this field (a pun for those who care). Most serious users though have no problem with the GNU license and a whole lot of very good quality work goes into GMP. Like, on a scale comparable to the entire boost effort.
I don't have a big appetite for investing in a lib that's just good enough, when I could instead contribute to the one that does it best. Not for my research work, anyway.
Boost should probably include something usable though, just like it needs to include enough linear algebra infrastructure to handle common tasks. Something comparable to the Java or .NET bignum support, enough for basic crypto and the usual demo programs.
Duplicating GMP's production values would mean duplicating their investment in platform-specific optimizations, something incompatible with existing boost organization, practices, and personnel interests.
I don't see anything ambitious happening in this area, but I'm just an interested observer. Others will likely have other views.
I would *love* to have a bignum library in Boost. Although I like GMP, its difficulty of building on VS, and its highly restrictive license (for my projects anyway, completely free and I give out source when asked, the GPL will not work with the bulk of the code and the purposes of the projects I work on, for an open-source license, the GPL is absolutely worthless, I prefer a BSD or Boost style license) makes it rather absolutely worthless, even considering all the work that has gone into it, seems so wasted. It should be such a generic thing (a bignum library), yet they completely destroyed the usefulness of it. So yes, I would love one in Boost, just one other library I would not have to manage separately and would have a lot of work done on it as well. I think work mainly done for the x86 (-64) and the other top 3 or 4 platforms (ppc, arm, etc...) would be more then enough to make it very useful, with slower pure C++ fallbacks for everything else.