On 02 Feb 2015, at 17:58, phil@highoctane.be wrote:

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Pierre CHANSON <chans.pierre@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,
I was wondering if there was a package to manipulate floats like the MPFR library in C...

One issue with MPFR is the licensing, which is GNU.

I wonder if Pharo couldn't get a special licence for embedding as "MPFR has continuously been supported by the INRIA...".

Pharo is now 32-bit and uses the floatplugin to do the actual fast math.

Pharo with the 64-bit system will be able to do better and the float plugin will have to be rewritten anyway.

But MPFR could be put into a plugin.

As far as I am concerned, I'd rather get something based on GMP (https://gmplib.org/) but we are there in GNU territory. Which is not what I want for commercial apps.

This table: http://www.mpfr.org/mpfr-current/timings.html is showing some LGPL licencing that may be easier to deal with. But for sure, none of that is MIT :-(