Replacement for GMP: Update

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

[Narrowing to GHC hackers plus Esa]

| It would be easy to change the definition of OPENSSL_malloc to call
| RTS-memory as necessary.  It would be more efficient for BN to be
| garbage collected (these bignum libraries allocate and delete a lot
| of small memory blocks (~1-2KB for large integers)).  Since
| ForeignPtr is simply too slow I am bringing BN value allocations into
| the rts as close as possible to how you did it with GMP.

OK so you are talking of taking a copy of the BN code, changing the
function names, and statically linking its allocator to GHC's RTS.

If someone wants to make a program that uses BN for some other purpose,
they get the original BN, whose function names don't clash, and which
uses malloc.

Sounds ok to me.

Simon

| 
| 
| > Making a single word contain either a pointer or a non-pointer
| > (depending on the setting of some bit) would have some quite global
| > implications, as would losing 32 bit precision from Int#.  I suggest
| > that you do not couple these two projects together!  Do the GMP
thing
| > first, then investigate this later.  We have quite a few
bit-twidding
| > ideas that we have never followed up.
| 
| The original idea was to create a specialized Int30# for that
| purpose.  In any case implementing it would certainly make my
| intended job--getting this done in time for the next release--a bit
| more difficult.
| 
| Best regards,
| Peter