[perl #36330] [TODO] Create a BigNum PMC

[jerry gay]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 10:23, Will Coleda <will at coleda.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 1:12 PM, chromatic <chromatic at wgz.org> wrote:
>> On Thursday 05 February 2009 08:57:18 jerry gay wrote:
>>
>>> we will roll our own bignum, and give users the ability to use gmp or
>>> another external library at configure time.
>>
>> That sounds like a fantastic recipe for hard-to-debug configuration problems
>> and all of the joys of fixing copious amounts of bugs we don't even know
>> about.
>>
>> We're pretty decent at writing VMs and compiler tools and languages.  If we
>> were also good at writing transcendental and arbirtrary precision math
>> libraries, we'd probably already have written one.
>>
>> -- c
>
> My 2 cents: it's ok to rely on external libraries. If they don't exist
> on our core platforms, we could do something crazy like help port
> them.
>
> We do not need to reinvent every wheel. We're already reinventing
> several as it stands.
>
silly me. i keep getting caught up in "old-think" lately. of course,
we've changed direction on this point, and the "new-think" is that we
do plan on relying on external libraries where it makes sense. we need
sane overflow semantics for our numeric pmcs if gmp isn't found, and
sane exceptions for unicode operations if icu isn't available.

a big warning in the configure output if icu or gmp isn't found would
certainly be a nice addition, so users know what they're in store for
if they don't have the (all but)? required external libraries
installed.

sorry for the confusion.
~jerry