Re: bignum branch

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Not sure what you mean by "our GMP substitute source code".  Do you
> mean mini-gmp?  I didn't yet look at it, and so I don't know what that
> means in practice.  (Someone said it's less efficient than GMP?)

Yes, I meant mini-gmp. And yes, it'd be less efficient than real GMP, something 
we'd have to live with on 32-bit-long hosts until GMP gets its act together 
(which I hope wouldn't take that long). I don't think the efficiency loss would 
be major, as bignums aren't commonly used.

> There's no need to wait anyway.  We should condition use of GMP on
> EMACS_INT being not wider than the appropriate GMP type (I guess
> mp_bitcnt_t?), and then if and when GMP learns to support 64-bit
> Windows, things will "just work".

Tom's idea is to just assume GMP in almost all the source code (and to compile 
and use mini-gmp as a substitute if libgmp is not available), as this simplifies 
a lot of things. For example, Elisp code won't have to worry about integer 
overflow, which is a significant win. If this approach performs well enough, I'd 
prefer its simplicity.