Re: [PATCH] Change module interface to no longer use GMP objects directly.

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/24/19 1:28 AM, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> It's like compiling for a completely different architecture.

Yes, and that's the point.

We agree that choice of 'configure' options can change the platform, and 
that one cannot assume that modules built for one platform are 
compatible with an Emacs built for another.

The disagreement is whether we should consider GMP to be "part of Emacs" 
(so GMP should not affect the module ABI) or "part of the platform" (so 
GMP can affect it). Both approaches are plausible; the former lets 
modules be more portable, and the latter gives modules better 
performance. Although I'm a fan of portability, here the portability 
advantage seems small and the performance advantage significant, so it's 
not clear that saying "GMP is part of Emacs" would be a win.

Since an Emacs 27 release is imminent, perhaps the best thing to do 
would be to remove the extract_big_integer and make_big_integer methods 
from src/emacs-module.h.in. These methods are not good in master because 
they depend on gmp.h, and the proposed replacements are not good because 
they're slow and awkward. Surely we can do better than either, but we 
can't do that in a rush.

Plus, quite possibly it will turn out that module authors don't much 
need a specialized API for bignums. After all, we've gotten along so far 
without a specialized API for bool-vectors, and to some extent bignums 
are just bool-vectors in disguise.

I can propose a simple patch along these lines, if there's interest.