On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 10:31:06PM -0400, Aaron Sherman wrote: > My guess is that Rakudo will ultimately develop its own > arbitrary-precision integer representation, rather than trying to use > the BigInt that comes with Parrot. Also, IIRC, Parrot's BigInt > implementation only works on systems that have certain libraries > installed. > > Well... that's true, but unlike some libraries out there, gmp isn't exactly a > difficult dependency to meet. [...]
I wasn't intending to imply that we would not be using the gmp library; only that Parrot's current interface, build system, and implementation isn't the way we're likely to do it. I'm not saying "don't use Parrot bignums" for this. I'm saying that bignum support isn't a high priority for the core at the moment, that when we do implement bignums it probably won't use the Parrot-supplied BigInts (because of other core changes in the pipeline), and that we'd likely entertain patches if someone wanted to try to get Rakudo to work with Parrot's bignums (but they'll likely get massively refactored with the new object system). Pm
