On May 14, 2012, at 12:49 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:

On 14 May 2012 00:03, Lawson English <lenglish5@cox.net> wrote:

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[pharo-project list added back in]

On 5/13/12 1:34 PM, Nicolas Cellier wrote:

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[100000 primeSwingFactorial] timeToRun 3411 [100000 factorial] timeToRun 61219 So gmp is still 40x faster than a reasonably optimized Smalltalk factorial... I think that's fair, because gmp is highly optimized. Since cost is dominated by LargeInteger arithmetic, and since Smalltalk LargeInteger arithmetic in primitives still operates on bytes, I'm not so surprised of the gap... I'd like to see a 64bit image operating on 32 bits positive integers digits, that would already be a progress... Nicolas

For me, the most interesting thing would be to figure out how to integrate such external libraries more tightly into the language syntax.

Right now, x := 3.14159... always creates a Float, which is stored as a double.

x class ===> Float.

What if I wanted to generate a gmplib floating point number (or rational or large integer) automatically when the gmplib binding is available? For Floats, there is a GNU project maintained by some groups at Inria:

http://www.mpfr.org/ The main goal of MPFR is to provide a library for multiple-precision floating-point computation which is both efficient and has a well-defined semantics. It copies the good ideas from the ANSI/IEEE-754 standard for double-precision floating-point arithmetic (53-bit significand). -- Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de