On 24 March 2010 19:20, swagat konchada <swagatata@gmail.com> wrote:
1. Is there sufficient interest for a BigDecimal proposal on the lines of the Java implementation of BigDecimal (or has there been some prior work that can be used as a foundation?)
I think proposing a BigDecimal is premature until a BigInteger has made it into Boost. Keep the scope small for now; we don't know exactly what's needed just yet.
2. What are the deficiencies of bigint that have prevented its inclusion into the Boost distribution so as to address the same as part of my GSoC proposal.
Licensing is one issue; IIRC there is a significant portion for whom any license other than a Boost-like one is unacceptable, thus making a GMP-based, and thus LGPLed, BigInt insufficient. On the other hand, optimizing all the algorithms involved is a huge task, and probably not something the single-implementor/sponsor/maintainer model generally used by Boost is good at. As such, a Boost-only library would probably not have the performance demanded by a substantial portion of its users. So as I've said before, I think a Boost project should be mostly an expression-template system that provides a nice interface on top of an externally-provided set of numeric operations.